Ottawa seeks job market clarity – Labour market survey

2015/02/10 Leave a comment

Good course correction:

The $8-million survey, which was announced several months ago and is just now under way, marks a return to more traditional methods after the Conservative government ran into criticism for relying heavily on a much less expensive private software program.

The Globe and Mail revealed that the government’s claims were the result of a problem with the data, which included jobs from the classified site Kijiji where the same job can be reposted many times, producing a false impression of a rising demand for labour.

When jobs from Kijiji were removed from the data set, the rise in job vacancies essentially disappeared.

Yet one year later, government officials and other labour market observers continue to struggle with the best way to measure the job market in an age when traditional job ads have been replaced with online job boards.

Two federal departments – Finance Canada and Employment and Social Development Canada – continue to pay for a database of online job ads from Wanted Analytics. The company runs software that scans online job boards as well as individual company websites to produce a database of jobs. The database it provides to government departments can be altered to include or remove various sources, including Kijiji.

Finance Canada renewed its contract with Wanted in December for another year at a cost of $18,250.

A Finance Canada spokesperson said the department uses the data along with other sources – such as Statistics Canada and the Bank of Canada – as part of its analysis of the labour market.

Employment and Social Development Canada said it does not use the database for labour market projections.

“This data can still be useful to the department to better understand current labour market conditions as they pertain to online job postings,” ESDC spokesperson Simon Rivet wrote in an e-mail.

Dan Kelly, the president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said his organization supports the new survey even though some employers complain that answering questionnaires is a form of red tape.

Mr. Kelly said he expects the new survey will support the view of employers that labour shortages are real and that measures such as the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, while controversial, are needed.

“Ultimately we need better sources that everyone can rely on and accept as a true state of affairs on the labour market,” he said.

Now all we need is to reinstate the Census.

Ottawa seeks job market clarity – The Globe and Mail.

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Internal memo reveals Ottawa cut labour market data spending

2014/06/12 Leave a comment

More indications of the botched up Temporary Foreign Workers program, linked to bad labour market data, cutbacks and overall approach to evidence-based policy making:

“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.

Internal memo reveals Ottawa cut labour market data spending – The Globe and Mail.

Update:

The Government announced that it would restore funding to StatsCan to improve labour market information:

“The government will be launching two significant, robust, new labour market information studies,” Mr. Kenney told the House of Commons Wednesday. “Of them, one will be a quarterly study on job vacancies and the other a robust annual survey on wage rates, just as experts have asked us to do.”

Sources say the new $14-million would largely reverse the 20 per cent cut by 2015-16, returning the department’s annual spending on labour market information to more than $80-million.

Ottawa increases funding for labour-market surveys

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , ,