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Youth Unemployment: The Canary in the Coal Mine
Unemployment has remained stubbornly high in Canada, made worse by the consequences of Donald Trump’s tariffs and the lingering effects of high interest rates. As always, young people bear the heaviest burden of a weakening labour market. They are the last hired, and first fired – and hence rising unemployment is a danger sign of labour market turbulence ahead. Last summer had the highest unemployment among returning students since the turn of the century (save the COVID pandemic), and the coming summer job season shows no signs of substantial improvement.
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Transition Away from Fossil Fuel Jobs is Already Occurring: Here’s How to Manage it Better
A report from the Centre for Future Work presents new research on the ongoing decline of fossil fuel employment in Canada, and strategies for managing that decline more effectively and fairly. The report, Worker Voice and Effective Transitions for Fossil Fuel Workers in Canada (by Jim Stanford and Kathy Bennett), also asks fossil fuel workers what sorts of supports they want as this decline continues, and lays out best practices to avoid unemployment during the transition.
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Federal Budget 2025: Unpacking the New Capital Budgeting Framework
Leading into this budget, the Carney government made much of a new distinction between operational spending and capital spending: between “spending” and “investing”. However, in practice this distinction was mostly optics – and did not reflect any meaningful change in budget accounting and reporting.
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Happy Minimum Wage Day, Canada!
Half of Canada’s provinces all increased their minimum wage on October 1: Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. So this is a good occasion to celebrate the importance of higher minimum wages as a powerful tool for improving incomes and reducing inequality.
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Enormous Jobs Potential from Energy Transition Investments
Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford recently collaborated with the Centre for Civic Governance and the Canadian Building Trades Unions (CBTU) on a new report cataloguing the future job-creation for building trades workers that will result from upcoming investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency measures, in order to meet Canada’s commitment to achieve a net-zero economy by 2050.
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Building a Sovereign, Value-Added, and Sustainable Economy
In this existential 'Elbows Up' moment for Canada's economy, public discourse has been overly influenced by loud demands from corporations and their political backers to implement their age-old agenda: deregulate (especially environmental rules), cut taxes, build more pipelines.
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A Bad Deal with Trump is Worse than No Deal at All
Trade negotiations between Canada and the U.S. are continuing, as the revised August 1 deadline approaches. Reports indicate that despite Canadian concessions (on border security, defense spending, and the Digital Services Tax), the U.S. is refusing to remove current and threatened tariffs on Canadian products. Last week Prime Minister Carney warned Canadians that an eventual deal with the U.S. will likely include continued substantial U.S. tariffs. An emerging narrative from government and business quarters suggests that if tariffs imposed on Canada are lower than on other countries (resulting in a less severe ‘average effective tariff’ rate), then Canada should count this as a victory.
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The Economic Benefits of Expanded Child Care in British Columbia
The Centre for Future Work has released a new report documenting the widespread economic benefits resulting from the ongoing expansion of early learning and child care services (ELCC) in British Columbia, as part of the roll-out of the new Canada-wide $10-per-day child care system.
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New Data Confirms Canada-U.S. Trade is Balanced and Mutually Beneficial
The U.S, Census Bureau has released year-end 2024 data on America’s bilateral trade flows in goods and services. This data reconfirms that the U.S trade deficit is neither new, nor an “emergency” (as Trump has claimed in order to invoke special emergency powers to set tariffs). And it reconfirms that the U.S. trade relationship with Canada is uniquely balanced, and beneficial to the U.S.
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Per Capita GDP is a Deeply Flawed Measure of Economic Performance and Living Standards
During the recent federal election, some business and political commentators used data regarding Canada’s relative performance in growing its “GDP per capita” to argue that Canadians have experienced a “lost decade” of stagnation and falling living standards. In this two-part analysis that first appeared here and here in Policy Options magazine (published by the Institute for Research on Public Policy), Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford explains how GDP per capita is calculated – and why it is not appropriate for measuring human well-being or economic progress.