Doug Ford is completely wrong in his suggestion that immigrants are aiming to laze around

2021/10/22 Leave a comment

Good analysis of the labour market and recent immigrants (traditionally who have lagged earlier periods of immigration):

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is not just wrong in suggesting that prospective immigrants to his province are aiming to laze around on the dole.

He’s exactly wrong. The Premier’s statements are completely at odds with an unprecedented shift in the labour market, in which the most recently arrived workers with landed-immigrant status have seen the biggest gains in employment rates, now nearly 10 percentage points higher than prepandemic levels. And that trend is more pronounced in Ontario than for Canada as a whole.

Speaking at an infrastructure-funding press conference in Windsor on Monday, Mr. Ford expressed his concern about a shortage of workers, adding that he would press the federal government to boost immigration levels.

But he went on to add a caveat. “You come here like every other new Canadian has come here, you work your tail off. If you think you’re coming to collect the dole and sit around, not gonna happen,” he said. “Go somewhere else. You want to work, come here.”

Mr. Ford’s concerns are misplaced. Immigrants must have permanent residency status before becoming eligible for payments under Ontario’s social assistance program.

Among workers aged 15 or older, the employment rate for those who have had landed-immigrant status for five years or fewer rebounded to prepandemic levels last October, far faster than any other category of citizenship status. As of September, 2021, the seasonally unadjusted employment rate for this group had risen to 71.8 per cent.

That represents a remarkable surge of nearly 10 percentage points. University of Waterloo economics professor Mikal Skuterud said employment rates usually do not change so rapidly; a long-term change of a single percentage point would normally be significant. ”This is massive,” he said.

What’s more, the gains by the most recent landed immigrants have resulted in that group leap-frogging Canadian-born workers. Before the pandemic, the employment rate for Canadian-born workers aged 15 and older, at 62.5 per cent, ran just ahead of that of workers with five years or less of landed-immigrant status, at 62.2 per cent.

That 0.3 percentage point gap has now reversed, and grown, with the employment rate for workers with five years or less of landed-immigrant status more than 10 percentage points higher than that of Canadian-born workers.

The same trend is evident among workers aged 15 or older who have held landed-immigrant status between five and 10 years. The employment rate for that group rebounded past prepandemic levels last month. Participation rates rose as well, and the absolute number of unemployed workers in this group has fallen markedly since the pandemic began.

Across Canada, the same pattern holds true, although the effect is not quite as pronounced.

Mr. Ford’s comments fly in the face of those data. The Premier’s office did not directly answer a question on what the basis is for Mr. Ford’s concern that new immigrants might choose not to work. Instead, spokesperson Ivana Yelich wrote in an e-mail that “… our province is open to anyone and everyone who wants to work hard, support their family and contribute to their community.”

Ottawa’s policy choices on immigration have played a role as well. Prof. Skuterud says that immigration reforms in the early 2000s introduced a points system that placed much greater emphasis on employability. The result was that immigrants in the past 20 years have been better placed to compete in the job market relative to earlier cohorts.

Prof. Skuterud said the trends that have emerged during the pandemic are the reverse of the experience in previous recessions, when immigrant workers had the first and worst job losses, and the slowest recovery.

He points out that Ottawa dramatically curtailed immigration last year as part of the overall effort to limit border crossings. The number of new permanent residents fell by nearly half in 2020 compared with 2019. That decline has somewhat reversed this year, with the number of new permanent residents admitted between January and August equal to four-fifths of the total admitted during the same nine-month period in 2019.

Prof. Skuterud says the rebound in immigration threatens to stall the gains in employment rates that newer permanent residents have been making, and perhaps even reverse them. Beyond the sheer increase in immigration numbers, the federal government has also sharply reduced the minimum amount of points needed to qualify for landed-immigrant status as Ottawa seeks to boost the inflow of immigrants.

Together, those two factors threaten to create a new generation of immigrants that are less able to find employment easily. Even a tight labour market, Prof. Skuterud said, won’t be enough to keep some landed immigrants from floundering.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-doug-ford-is-completely-wrong-in-his-suggestion-that-immigrants-are/

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Despite funding boost, Statistics Canada jobs-data upgrade will take time – The Globe and Mail

2014/08/29 Leave a comment

Looks like some long-standing issues between the employer and household surveys. Not surprising that it will take time to build capacity to improve labour market information, but at least there is additional funding and acknowledgment of the need for better information to improve private and public policy:

Officials at Canada’s statistics agency are planning how to spend an additional $14-million a year that the Conservative government announced in June to fund two large new employer surveys.

That announcement followed months of criticism that the government was making policy decisions on everything from training to immigration without reliable job vacancy statistics. Since then, Statscan’s two existing labour market surveys have come under closer scrutiny and criticism.

The agency told The Globe and Mail on Wednesday the new money won’t have any immediate impact on those existing surveys, but Statscan isn’t ruling out changes down the road.

The agency is expected to release a report soon that will explain what led it to make the unprecedented decision this month of pulling its flagship jobs report, a survey of households called the Labour Force Survey, after the discovery of an error in its July numbers.

Despite funding boost, Statistics Canada jobs-data upgrade will take time – The Globe and Mail.

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Statistics Canada rushing to redo July job numbers

2014/08/14 Leave a comment

More bad news re StatsCan regarding its having to redo job numbers:

The incident will add fuel to a continuing debate over the quality of the federal government’s labour market data, which, economists contend, has generally been more volatile in recent years.

Peter Buchanan, senior economist with CIBC World Markets, said the error reinforces the fact that markets and policy makers need reliable information.

“Obviously, this does add to concerns on that front,” he said. “Good data is essential to steer the economic ship in the right direction.”

Federal departments – including Finance Canada – have recently used alternative private sector surveys based on Internet job postings to produce job vacancy statistics. That approach led to criticism after the Parliamentary Budget Officer pointed out that the government’s claim of rising job vacancies was almost entirely due to methodological problems associated with using job postings on the classified site Kijiji.

Partly as a response to that criticism, the government announced in June that it would give Statistics Canada an additional $14-million a year starting next year to produce a new job vacancy survey and a new survey on wages.

One of my doctors commented, regarding the cancellation of the Census, that  “there is nothing more costly than ignorance.” The government is paying the price for not having valued good quality data and statistics.

Statistics Canada rushing to redo July job numbers – The Globe and Mail.

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Job-vacancy rate plunges as Tories drop Kijiji data – Evidence vs Anecdote

2014/05/06 1 Comment

A reminder that bad and incomplete data can lead to bad policy decisions and arguments, as exemplified by the over-stating of labour shortages and justification for programs like Temporary Foreign Workers.

Employment and Social Development Canada recently revised its Employment Insurance, Monitoring and Assessment report to take out weak data from on-line sites like Kijiji (see earlier post How Kijiji’s data threw off Ottawa’s math on skills shortages – The Globe and Mail):

“There’s isn’t really any good data out there. Online postings are online postings. How well can you clean those up?” he [Mostafa Askari] asked, pointing out the need to avoid double counting jobs or counting jobs that have been filled but were not taken offline. He said the solution would be to give Statistics Canada more money to improve its research on job vacancies, which are based on surveys of employers.

“I think Statscan can definitely provide better data if they have the means to,” he said. “I assume they are obviously under budget constraints as well. So they have to put that as a priority but they won’t do it unless there’s pressure on them to provide that kind of information.”

Job-vacancy rate plunges as Tories drop Kijiji data – The Globe and Mail.

Konrad Yakabuski’s take on the problem with big data and lack of rigour in analysis:

Yet, if Mr. Kenney and his advisers are guilty of anything, it is of falling victim to the same social media hype that has led many data enthusiasts to spurn official statistics as oh-so yesterday. Want to know if the flu is headed your way or the housing market is set to take off? Why, go to Google Trends. Forget the official unemployment rate. Just track “lost my job” on Twitter.

The idea that the trillions of bytes of data we generate on social media are equipping policy-makers with vast new predictive powers is all the rage these days. Official statistics, the kind compiled by bureaucrats through scientifically tested surveys and representative samples, seem to bore the geeks. But they get all hot and bothered at the mere mention of the word algorithm….

This is but one example of how big data can lead to misguided policy. Mr. Kenney’s Kijiji snafu is another. You’d think this would make people cautious. But in our insatiable desire to make sense out of an increasingly complex world, we are turning evermore to big data to sort it out.

The latest trend is “data journalism” with The New York Times and several upstart media outlets hiring an army of twentysomething computer geeks to massage the numbers in order to spot trends, predict elections and provide funky, counterintuitive insights in the vein of Freakonomics.

The problem is that much of what they report is probably wrong, or at least tendentious. The Upshot, The Times feature launched April 22, has come under fire for stories that either read too much into the data or leave too much out. “First-rate analysis requires more than pretty graphs based on opaque manipulations of data unsuited to address the central substantive points,” prominent U.S. political scientist Larry Bartels wrote in response to one piece on Southern politics.

The most common sin in data journalism is making spurious correlations. Just because Google searches of the term “mortgage” have closely tracked Canadian housing sales in the past two years means nothing on its own.

Big data’s noise is drowning out the signal

A final irony, the final report of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Committee on the Public Service comes out at the same time as these news reports, affirming the need for outside information and discounting the value of more objective surveys:

New sources of information and data have shaken up the process of providing advice to government, he [David Emerson] said, and the public service is adapting to accept data from outside Statistics Canada or other traditional sources.

“I think we made some real progress in helping public servants to open up and I think political staff now have access to a lot of that same information, so there are checks and balances that I think are a little sharper-edged than they were perhaps in the past,” he said.

While I don’t disagree with opening up, we also need to learn the lessons from Kijiji jobs data, ensure better quality control and analysis, and strengthen the role of official statistics and Statistics Canada.

PS thinking more about the digital revolution: Emerson

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