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Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

Also record low unemployment. 4.9% in 2022 set records. For comparison Canada’s average unemployment rate is 7.5% over the last 50 years.

https://www.cicnews.com/2022/07/canadas-unemployment-rate-dr...

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The irony is that it was industry (especially small business) freaking out about that low unemployment rate and the pressure it was putting on wages that led to the bulk of Trudeau's demise.

They went crazy with the TFW program, LMIA, and immigration generally in order to reduce inflation. But this is not the kind of inflation that ordinary Canadians think of when we think of inflation -- grocery prices, etc. It's the inflation that business leaders freak out about: wage inflation.

And so the gov't acted, and increased the supply of skilled and unskilled labour, and here we are.

It's amusingly also the same inflation that led to Trudeau Sr. getting in a pile of trouble in the late 70s, too. In that case instead of immigration they tried the ill-fated "wage and price controls" legislation... which was... not popular.

It's almost as if raising the minimum wage is reflected as wage inflation when you're already in a condition where a large fraction of workers are near the wage floor. Adding labour supply isn't going to do anything about that unless it's biased towards higher skill.

(But honestly, I'd say a lot of these businesses deserve to fail if they can't afford to pay minimum wage workers.)

This was the cause of the panic, though. In the 2021/2022 time-frame many businesses that would normally only pay the minimum wage, give irregular hours, and treat people pretty woefully were forced to pay well above minimum wage. There was quite a bit of public anxiety from businesses about labour shortage and the result.

Please look at these numbers in depth - not how they're presenting them.

Similarly, the majority of industry growth has been Federal jobs - from Grok:

"Since Trudeau took office in 2015, the size of the federal public service has grown by approximately 43%. By March 31, 2024, the federal government's payroll included 367,772 employees, up from 257,034 in 2015."

43% increase; paid for by the public.

A 43% increase in federal jobs sounds big until you realize it’s ~110,000 positions over 9 years. For this to be the ‘majority of industry growth,’ Canada would need to have added just ~200,000 jobs in total since 2015. That’s laughably off—Canada typically adds hundreds of thousands of jobs annually. For context, Canada’s employment grew by ~2.7M jobs between 2015[1] and the end of 2024[2]. Federal job growth is a drop in that bucket, not the bucket itself.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/437730/employment-in-can... [2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241206/dq241...

A 43% increase and the state of affairs in Canada is far worse now, including that he doubled Canada's debt to over $1.2 trillion - so now our interest payments are also huge, far less money every day going to social services because it's instead just paying interest on the debt.

Came during the pandemic like every other country and still doesn’t compare to past debt level when compared to GDP which is how you compare debt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_public_debt#/media/Fi...

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