The latest $6.5 million tax payer funded ads are quite a work of fiction.Just enough 'truth' to make them believable. Like saying that Canada has the lowest debt and deficit of the G7. True in numbers, but when based on the percentage of our GDP, we actually have one of the highest. For instance, Britain, though they owe more money, their debt constitutes 42% of their GDP, while Canada's is almost 63%.
But the biggest fudge is on the employment situation. The jobs that are being created are not the same as the ones we lost.
According to Tavia Grant in the Globe:
...today’s employment landscape looks dramatically different than it did before the downturn: The number of jobless people rose by 800,000 between October, 2008, and October of last year. More people are involuntarily working part-time, and long-term unemployment has surged – to nearly a quarter of jobless people, from 15 per cent before the downturn.Our actual unemployment rate is 10%.
That surge is particularly worrisome. Long-term joblessness “can impair an individual’s ability to find a job when the economy improves,” said the authors, Jason Gilmore and Sébastien LaRochelle-Côté. “It can also affect stress levels and psychological well-being, and household finances often deteriorate, especially for those who exhaust their employment insurance benefits.” Among the long-term unemployed, the number of people without a job for at least a year doubled during the two-year period.
The stimulus programs provide temporary construction jobs, that do little for women, and the projects they are creating do not provide long-term jobs. I mean how many new jobs will a $4 library to a private religious school create?
We also have to remember that the global economic crisis was not something that came from nowhere, beyond any one's imagination or control. It was engineered by Wall Street and Goldman Sachs. The same Wall Street and Goldman Sachs now camped out in Jim Flaherty's office.
It's time for a reality check.
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