It's Just Money

It's not like the Liberals have to use THEIR money or have to account for losing someone else's:

President of @CanBorder Erin O’Gorman says she cannot account for disappearance of federal documents used in sweetheart contracting under $59.5 million #ArriveCan program. https://t.co/vAXBVZLQbq #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/sk4ZK44Iez

— Holly Doan (@hollyanndoan) February 14, 2024

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It's called slave labour:

No one takes orders at the Burger King in the rest stop off of Ontario’s Highway 401 near Port Hope. Instead, there’s a large touch screen that customers use to select and pay for their Whoppers and fries.

That is just one small example of how companies are choosing to adapt to falling unemployment, rather than griping about a labour shortage that is in large part a mirage. Unfortunately, such innovation seems to be the exception, with many business groups preferring to press for increases in cheap labour, in the form of temporary foreign workers.

Basic economics says that the price of something should rise if it is in short supply. But wages – in the middle of what business groups tout as an unprecedented labour shortage – have not even kept pace with inflation, and fretting over a labour shortage has mounted. Average hourly earnings have fallen since January, 2020, once inflation is taken into account. Translation: Businesses may be moaning about a labour shortage, but they aren’t willing to put their money where their moans are.

Another clue that claims of a widespread labour shortages aren’t quite what they seem came in a Statistics Canada report last week that looked at job vacancies, which were 2½ times greater in 2022 than in 2016.

There were stark differences in the rates, depending on a job’s education requirement. For positions requiring at least a bachelor’s degree, there was no general labour shortage.

But there were a large number of vacancies for jobs that only required a high-school diploma, or less. For those lower-skilled jobs, there were many more vacancies than unemployed workers. Even if all those workers were instantly hired, there still would have been 131,000 vacancies in the fourth quarter of last year, for instance.

Despite that apparent shortage, wages are not rising in response. That could be explained in part by a lack of pricing power by some employers. They may not be able to increase their own prices enough to absorb the cost of higher wages.

The heart of the answer, however, is the rise in the number of temporary foreign workers who are willing to work for cut-rate wages and are not as able to shift jobs nearly as easily as Canadian residents. The number of such workers has exploded since the pandemic, jumping to 120,000 at the end of 2022 from 73,360 at the end of 2019.