Tag: Employment

Starr’s Point Index #5

Starr’s Point Index #5

Posted by | Nov 12, 2020 | |

Country with largest increase in COVID-19 cases in October: Czechia (formerly Czech Republic) 379% Country with second largest increase: Poland 296% Canada’s October increase: 49% Country with highest rate of COVID positive tests to Oct. 31: Czechia 14.6% U.S test positivity rate to Oct. 31: 6.5% Canada test positivity rate to Oct. 31: 2.4% Nova Scotia rate to date: 0.94% [1]   COVID-USA Number of states with COVID-19 case increases greater than 50% in October: 15 Number of those 15 states won by Donald Trump in 2020 Presidential election: 11 Number of those 11 states that have not supported a...

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Starr’s Point Index #3

Starr’s Point Index #3

Posted by | Sep 5, 2020 | |

Percentage increase in reported COVID-19 deaths July 31-Aug. 31 Canada: 2.19% In the United States: 20.53% Worldwide: 26.42%[i] ******************* Countries reporting more than 100% increase in COVID-19 cases for August: Seven Country with greatest increase: Ethiopia 204.1% Country with second greatest increase: Philippines 150.9%[ii] ############### Percentage increase in reported COVID-19 cases in Canada July 31-Aug. 31: 11.7% Province with greatest increase July 31-Aug.31: Manitoba 196.8% Second largest: British Columbia 61.2% Nova Scotia increase: 1.68%[iii] %%%%%%%%%%%%%% Percentage increase in U.S. COVID-19 cases in August: 34.6% Number of countries in 37-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) with case increases...

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Media’s slant on Alberta economy helped Kenney’s cause

Media’s slant on Alberta economy helped Kenney’s cause

Posted by | Apr 18, 2019 | |

The fact it was predictable didn’t make the election result in Alberta any easier to take. Despite distant echoes of homophobia and misogyny, current allegations of electoral corruption and a clutch of dodgy candidates, Jason Kenney and his United Conservative Party won in a landslide. Albertans threw out Rachel Notley, a leader widely admired, and replaced her with someone many people, for good reason, can’t abide. A reason for this, we were told repeatedly, is the dreadful state of the Alberta economy. As many would have it, since world oil prices started to fall in 2014, Alberta’s been in...

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Jobs up overall but Nova Scotia wages lag and cultural industries sag

Jobs up overall but Nova Scotia wages lag and cultural industries sag

Posted by | Nov 2, 2018 | |

There was some positive news for the Nova Scotia economy in Friday’s release of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) from Statistics Canada. The increase in employment that began last December continued last month, with employment up nearly 10,000 from October 2017. However, any celebration of the job growth should be tempered by an earlier report from Statscan – last week’s Survey of Employment, Payroll and Hours. That survey, which provides a lot more detail than the LFS, reveals a couple of trends that could provide grist for the mill for critics of the Nova Scotia government’s approach on two...

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N.S. unemployment rate hits new low but jobs picture still troubling

N.S. unemployment rate hits new low but jobs picture still troubling

Posted by | May 16, 2018 | |

It seems to have passed unnoticed by the news media and the government spinners but the monthly labour force survey released last Friday revealed Nova Scotia hitting a milestone – the unemployment rate in April was 6.7 per cent. That’s the lowest it has been since Statistics Canada began reporting comparable data in 1976. Considering that double-digit unemployment was the norm in Nova Scotia for most of the 42 years covered by the data set, the low rate – part of a downward trend that started last fall – may once have been considered a big deal. The fact...

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Richard Starr, The man behind the Point

About Richard

RICHARD STARR has had careers as a journalist, public servant, broadcaster, political staffer and freelance policy adviser. He is author of numerous newspaper and magazine articles, a former radio and TV producer and weekly newspaper editor, and the author of three non-fiction books. Starr has lived in Dartmouth for more than 30 years.

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