From: Pierre FortinTo: Labour force observersDate: March 21, 2025Re: Why More Immigration Didn’t Solve Canada’s Labour Shortages From 2015 to 2023, the federal government allowed immigration levels to increase fivefold, mostly through a significant rise in temporary immigration. By the end of 2024, Canada had three million non-permanent residents, representing 7.3 percent of the country’s population […]
Published in the Financial Post As trade tensions with the United States escalate, putting tens of thousands of Canadian jobs at risk, our home-grown productivity problem continues to erode the country’s economic strength. Without a change of strategy, Canada faces stagnating wages, declining competitiveness, slowing GDP growth and eroding living standards. Our recent labour market review for […]
From: Christina Caron and Glen HodgsonTo: Economy observersDate: March 11, 2025Re: The Erosion of Natural Capital and Declining Productivity Growth As we discussed yesterday, labour productivity and multifactor productivity (MFP) growth rates have been declining in advanced economies for several decades, and the decline in labour productivity growth has now extended to emerging economies. While […]
The total number of Canadian jobs tied to our exports to the US has grown over time, except during the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic – though in both instances they rebounded quickly. While American jobs supported by US exports to Canada have declined slightly since 2014, they still total around 1.4 million. […]
The number of federal government employees grew sharply from 340,000 in 2014/15 to nearly 440,000 in the most recent fiscal year. The rise in wages and salaries has grown at an average annual rate of 2.8 percent over the same period – a figure that, while more modest, surpasses the average annual rate of inflation […]
February 25, 2025 – Canada’s expansive immigration policy from 2016 to 2024 has expanded the labour force but has also increased demand for goods, services, and infrastructure, more likely sustaining or even increasing overall labour shortages rather than easing them, according to a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute. In “The Immigration Paradox: How […]
Study in Brief This study investigates the effects of Canada’s expansive immigration policy, implemented between 2016 and 2024, on labour shortages. It explores how the influx of permanent and temporary immigrants has affected the balance between labour supply and demand, with attention to whether the policy has met one of its key objectives – alleviating […]
February 11, 2025 – Canada’s rapidly growing population of non-permanent residents (NPRs), particularly international students, is increasingly undercounted in government labour market data, according to a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute. This underrepresentation in Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey (LFS) distorts critical economic indicators such as unemployment rates and nominal wage growth, creating […]
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