[CivicAccess-discuss] G & M: Internal memo reveals Ottawa cut labour market data spending

Wed Jun 11 20:12:23 AEST 2014

Internal memo reveals Ottawa cut labour market data spending

 Bill Curry <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/authors/bill-curry>

OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail

Published Wednesday, Jun. 11 2014, 6:00 AM EDT

Last updated Wednesday, Jun. 11 2014, 6:06 AM EDT
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   An internal memo reveals Employment Minister Jason Kenney’s department
cut spending on labour market information by over 20 per cent at a time
when the government was coming under fire over the quality of its jobs data.

Spending on “Learning and Labour Market Information” – which includes
gathering, analyzing and sharing labour data – dropped to $66.9-million in
2013-14, down from $80.8-million the year before and $84.9-million in
2011-12, according to the memo to the minister’s office.
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Debate over the quality of Canada’s jobs data has heated up in recent
months as the Conservative government launches a new Canada Job Grant
training program, reforms employment insurance and will soon announce major
changes to the temporary foreign worker program. Critics – including bank
economists, provincial ministers and the Parliamentary Budget Officer –
have warned that these changes are taking place in the absence of clear
data about the state of Canada’s labour market.

“Things are getting done in the opposite direction,” said economist Don
Drummond, who will release a paper Wednesday for the Institute for Research
on Public Policy calling on Ottawa to tackle Canada’s long-standing labour
market data problems. “Normally you create an information infrastructure
and that informs the policy. But here we’ve had dramatic changes in policy
with the temporary foreign worker program and the Canada Job Grant, while
we’re undermining the lousy information infrastructure we already had.”

Mr. Drummond chaired a 2009 panel on labour market information and says
many of the panel’s recommendations have not yet been fully implemented.

A spokesperson for Mr. Kenney said the minister has repeatedly noted the
need for better labour market information in Canada and is looking for ways
to achieve this. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Employment and Social
Development Canada explained the spending reduction by stating that the
department has modernized its data portfolio in a “tighter fiscal
environment,” in part by stopping low-priority surveys to fund
higher-priority research.

The recent debate over labour data has focused in part on the government’s
decision to reduce funding for Statistics Canada, which gathers labour data
through phone surveys of employers, while relying more on private-sector
data based on scans of Internet job boards.

The internal memo, which was released under Access to Information
legislation, shows the department began a contract in August, 2011 with
Wanted Technologies to provide “Private Sector Job Postings Data.” The
company has received about $88,000 a year for the past two years.

The Conservative government’s use of data from Wanted Analytics – a
division of Wanted Technologies – has been a source of controversy over the
past year. The company’s database of job postings is populated by software
that scans online job boards. The government used this data to conclude in
March that Canada’s job vacancy rate was over 4 per cent – much higher than
Statistics Canada’s numbers, which have been hovering below 1.5 per cent in
recent months.

However the Parliamentary Budget Officer has noted that much of the
difference can be attributed to double counting in the Wanted data, which
relies on websites such as Kijiji, where the same job can appear in various
sections of the website.

The memo to the minister’s office shows funding for Statistics Canada
surveys for regional labour market data has dropped from $17.1-million in
2011-12 to $14.9-million in 2013-14.

Follow Bill Curry on Twitter: @curryb <https://twitter.com/@curryb>

-- 
Tracey P. Lauriault
http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
http://datalibre.ca/
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