Canada Employment Report

First I must say the bass is high and it is harder to hear this clearly in my speakers due to this. It is possible to clean this sound file up.

When it comes to the content, I have a few problems with the year over year analysis and conclusions. The main issues are a lack of context. This is a period of a declining middle income group and a reduced ability (for those who wanted it) to get by on a single income. Women in particular were increasing their numbers in the workforce.

Secondly your analysis certainly does recognize the difference between part time and full time work but does not go further. It does not look at the quality of jobs. This is important especially as this period saw a reduction in employment insurance eligibility. People were forced to take any job as benefits ran out and so an economy would show a return to full time even if the person was forced to accept a position at a much lower wage just to get by. Without a qualitative analysis any jobs recovery statistics considered over time will be misleading – and the role of reduced insurance would also speak to raw numbers as well. You see a significant increase in part time work in the early 80s. This coincides with the effects of insurance changes which forced people to take part time work as benefits ran out.

To this end another bit of context is the demand for part time work vs involuntary part time work. There are differences in ages and time periods here and it is possible to guess at the reasons for this in the light of the legislation governing insurance, family economies encouraging entry to the workforce of second family wage earner, increased family breakdown and single income families due to the other person no longer being there, demand for part time by those working past when they might otherwise have preferred to retire early but lack the finances, involuntary part time as people leave manufacturing jobs and the service sector grows.

During the period you see women in full time work going from 37-52% while men went from 72-61%. All other demographic and economic changes are reflected here.

Without all of this, I am afraid the analysis is too simplistic.

The thesis of the harder the fall the greater the recovery is less than it seems. It is rather obvious. If more jobs are lost you would expect there to be more people to hire, more demand and more capacity to return some of those. What would be more interesting is evaluating the net gain and loss by averaging the periods of loss and immediate gains thereafter to see what lasting net effects were. It is not a shock to see a relationship between loss and recovery – if fewer people lose their jobs there are fewer people looking, fewer companies rehiring, and less capacity for growth. This is also true if people are forced into permanent downgrades taking jobs lower than they had before with less insurance to help them recover to where they were.

Interesting and than you for your work -- but to be useful I think you need to work in the other variables and changes in order to be able to see the liekey explanations for the data. And you need to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary Part Time work and higher quality and lower quyality Full time work for the analysis to start to be useful.

I hope this helps