Tag: Labour Force

Jobs vanish but “job creators” get richer

The January labour force report from Statistics Canada contained a nasty jolt. Amidst a generally positive report for the country as a whole there was a great big outlier for Nova Scotia. In December there were 13,300 fewer full-time jobs in this province than there were in December 2015. Surprisingly, the biggest drop – 9,600 – was recorded in Halifax. Even more shocking, elsewhere in Canada there was an increase of 81,000 full-time jobs in December. The jobs meltdown is only news to a degree. As recorded often on this site, something is clearly rotten in the economic state...

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Latest jobs report adds to Nova Scotia’s bad economic news

Media coverage of last week’s release of July employment numbers from Statistics Canada focused mainly on the bad news at the national level, where the survey turned up a loss of 31,200 jobs last month. As has become customary lately, Alberta’s contribution to the national employment malaise received a lot of attention as well, including the man-bites-dog revelation that the province’s unemployment rate last month crept past Nova Scotia’s for the first time in recorded (post-1976) history. Taken together, the story lines suggest that, compared to the rest of the country, Nova Scotia’s employment picture is looking up. Unfortunately,...

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Getting government out of the way not working for jobs

The successful provincial Liberal campaign of 2013 was politically brilliant but policy stupid. We had another glimpse of that last week as a roomful of lawyers and experts appeared before the Public Utilities and Review Board to act out a melodrama called “Breaking the Nova Scotia Power monopoly.” The title of the show, which has been burning up time and money for two years now, comes from the Liberal campaign platform. In the real world of power utility regulation “Much Ado about (almost) nothing” would be a more apt title. The likely outcome of all of the activity will...

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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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