Some do believe in the 'invisible hand' of the market

...if you actually read the article, you'd have seen that public sector expansion was one of the primary drivers. Add to that the government tax credit programs driving the oil & gas sector, and various regulatory requirements and CRTC mandated broadband service expansion creating work in the IT sector, and I think it's pretty clear that government had a hand in it all.

Sounds like the invisible hand of socialism saving capitalism from itself again. Imagine society was relying solely on private sector capitalism to create jobs? Imagine you were living in 1929 America, or 1985 Chile ...

Tory times are tough times.....so it should be expected that taxpayers hard earned money will be given away to big corporations to cover their loses and taxpayers will find themselves collecting unemployment insurance collected from fellow employed taxpayers.

Just give them a majority and see what happens then.

Homelessness perhaps? This is what 27% of Canadians voted for us to be subjected too.

Maybe now that economic issues are in the forefront of the Canadian they will vote accordingly. The majority seem to be just concerned about one thing anyways-money and that's all. With their income trust loses maybe now they have seen the light.

Question now is ...who is going to pay?

I heard a radio interview today about the loss of call centre jobs. The Conservative being inerviewed (his name was Michael Darch) said that we won't win the battle for lower end jobs and should focus on the higher end jobs.

Problem with this is that the people laid off at the call centre places (like Dell) do not have the skills for the higher end jobs.

We need to care about lower income people's employment as well as those in higher brackets with the higher skills.

Yes of course I recognize the tragedy of losing manufacturing jobs and want something done about that but we should not ignore the loss of jobs in the lower end where this is often people's first jobs. (Just because we have not had a student jobs crunch in a few years, doesn't mean this can't come up quickly.) But we need to recognize that there are people living (or trying to) live on these wages and paying this tax.

As far as a strategy for dealing with lower income jobs we could make them more competative by increasing the basic exemption for tax to the cost of living and index it- which would effectively bring the exemption from 9k to 15k. The extra take home pay would help both the employers and lower income workers and take off the current pressure on minimum wage which is not a living wage. Few people address the fact that a minimum income is not enought to support government. Perhaps people with marginal skills to bring to the workplace ought not to have to subsidize government on minimum wage. Enough that they can sustain themselves.

As far as manufactuaring jobs we can address these by bringing in standards for environmental and social inputs. This is controversial as it would substantially raise the cost of what we buy- but most of these are luxuries. The bottom line would be that we would be on a level playing field with countries without standards. So for example - we say that we will buy TVs made by people who recieved at least $8 an hour.

So we don't say to the Chinese we won't buy your stuff we just say that you have to document that you have met minimum standards for environment and wages for each product we permit to be imported. Sure there will be some attempts at fraud but it would get out the message that we would pay a little more for an item from a plant that did not dump raw waste into the river than one that did. Sicne this is a consumer standard that applies here as well as elsewhere, I see no problem with trade aggreements.

Of course the byproduct would be that we could actually make the products if we were not competing with wages and environmental practices that would be illegal here.

I recognize this is radical and we would be faced recognizing that we are subsidizing our lifestyle with socially and environmentally unsustainable practices that are illegal here but if we did this we would no longer have to wear the hypocrisy label when talking about other countries' social, economic, environmental and even human rights records.

[ 29 January 2008: Message edited by: Sean in Ottawa ]

[ 29 January 2008: Message edited by: Sean in Ottawa ]

Huh? To Halifax?
Most are going across the border.

Movement of any jobs from Central Canada to Atlantic Canada which has higher unemployment is obviously a benefit to the nation as we most need the jobs there.

But the elimination of jobs or the moving of them out of the country is a serious problem. that is what I am referring to. That and the fact that there is an attitude that we don't need to care about lower paying jobs. We need to be worried about all the jobs that are on the line.

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Originally posted by adam stratton:
[b]...Yeah! I can imagine the economy sitting at its desk, pondering what to do with the loss of manufacturing jobs and then it decided "there it is!, how about creating 400 000 jobs most of them high paid ones".

Must be the for adults version of Santa! What a crock !

[/b]

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haha, good one adam. i read this yesterday right after reading [url=http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080128.wwall28/BNSt... article[/url] and wondered who Brad Wall thinks does control things...

quote:

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...He has just returned from a "comfort" mission to Calgary, where he told oil and gas executives that his government's intention is to keep the "momentum" going that has seen recent billion-dollar-plus announcements in potash development and oil refineries and will see well exploration rise significantly this year.

[b]"Government doesn't control these things,"[/b] he says, "but government can have a role in keeping that momentum going."

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but now we know, it's the Economy! i imaginged Wall walking into Economy's office, shaking his invisible hand, and asking advice on what Crown's to sell, and how many public sector layoffs, service cuts and corporate tax reductions to make, to keep that "momentum" the NDP left him a platter of. [img]tongue.gif" border="0[/img]

And when we have bad policy, like Dalton's gang in Toronto guaranteeing highest commercial electricity rates in the country, it kills jobs. Especially across Northern Ontario where a significant percentage votes NDP.

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Originally posted by GreenNeck:
If you can drive a truck, swing a hammer or string up power cables you can go to Alberta and easily make 100,000+$ a year. I guess this is what the CIBC referred to by high paid jobs.

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My neighbour's son across the road was hired for construction in Alberta last summer, after two months on the job - no training whatsoever - he fell off high scaffolding and broke his back; after two months in a body cast, he is now doing physical therapy and is an inch shorter because of back and spinal cord surgery.

Our company hasn't put an apprentice through in about 5 years, we hire temps instead and wonder why they can't so the job.