Rocking the Boat - the Value of Civil Disobedience

You may have heard a story recently about a young miss Brigette DePape. A page in the Senate, the 21-year-old held up a sign reading "Stop Harper" during the Throne Speech. The picture is quite poignant:



Although certainly not anywhere near the scale or intensity, it does conjure images of Tienanmen Square: a young individual, driven by unwavering core beliefs in the face of certain punishment, makes a David-and-Goliath-esque stand against a seemingly unstoppable government.

Her method is certainly not one I would choose, but the concerns she has raised are both very valid and ones that seem to have been ignored by the populace at large. The value of her actions extends beyond the sign - they show that the victory of the Conservatives is not total, that other viewpoints still exist, and that the left may have regained some firmness of conviction.

Oddly, though, I have seen many comments and editorials saying something to the effect of the following:

"How dare she disrespect a democratically elected [read: Conservative] government? The majority of people voted for this result. Her side lost, so she should shut up and get over it. Honestly, what a spoiled brat - what does she even have to protest about?"

(And yes, I have seen all of the above sentences in some form or another, and I have seen them many times. Perhaps I'm just looking in the wrong places...)

Let's address this one by one:

Disrespecting a democratically elected government:

Last I read, criticism wasn't necessarily disrespect. Parliament is an institution which is in part meant for the airing of grievances - although her presentation was unconventional, she in no way disrupted the proceedings (the Governor General did not pause for a moment), committed illegal activities, or put anyone in harm's way. By contrast, the Olympics protesters in Vancouver who ransacked local government offices did all three. Besides, the Conservatives are hardly the ones to be lecturing on respect for Parliamentary institutions. I suspect the concern with the particular editorials I was reading was that she was disrespecting their democratically elected government.

The majority of people...: 

As per my last post here, there were not a majority who voted for the Conservatives. Besides, even if there were, what difference does it make? Do the views of a minority suddenly become irrelevant once we reach 50% plus one? I'm tired of hearing this plainly counter-factual red herring.

Her side lost, so she should just shut up: 

I'm frankly quite astonished at this one.

I mean, I know that Conservatives have recently displayed quite a lack of understanding of Parliamentary functioning; there is no 'winning' or 'losing' side - the party that gets the most seats has the first chance at forming government, but it is no guarantee. Even then, the 'losers' continue to stay on in opposition.

However, what is appalling about this viewpoint is that it suggests that if your side didn't 'win' this occasional electoral contest your voice no longer counts. Not only is it anathema to the idea of representative democracy that people's opinions should cease to matter because of election results, but it also undermines the true meaning of a democratic system.

A healthy democracy is the product of a free and open society in which meaningful discourse can and does take place at all levels. The FightHST campaign and petition in BC, with its liberal, intentional use of logical fallacies, misquoted research, and outright fabrications, does not qualify as "democracy in action" no matter how many signatures its backers can brag about. Likewise, the government's introduction and campaign in favour of the tax have skewed facts and undermined our faith in democratic institutions. Thus democracy is clearly about more than voting: the quality of political action should always be judged on how it contributes to the advancement of societal well-being, not what form it takes or whose mouth it comes from.

Brigette remarked that democracy is not something that happens every four years or is restricted to parties and politicians. I think we should take that to heart.

What a spoiled brat:

I can think of a lot of words to describe Brigette's actions, and certainly not all of them positive. But spoiled? She gave up a job that is both extremely difficult to get and highly rewarding once in, and all so she could take a stand of principle. Of course she should have been fired - the job of a page is to remain professional and apolitical, and she certainly left those at the door.

However, her actions speak volumes about the strength of her convictions and how she clearly doesn't take her success for granted. People such as Linda Keen (former Nuclear Safety Commissioner), Dr. Munir Sheikh (former head of Statistics Canada), and Richard Colvin (former senior diplomat in Afghanistan) have all spoken up against this government and were fired, resigned, and had a vicious smear campaign launched against them, respectively. They took a stand on principle, for the interests of Canadians and non-Canadians alike, and we are the better for it.

What does she even have to protest about?:


Largely the same items that came up in the election: prisons, jets, militarism, et cetera. She has remarked that "Harper's agenda is against Canadian values". As someone who ascribes to the beliefs and values of modern liberalism, I would argue that her concerns are legitimate. Besdies, there is always something to be criticized, and the more people we have keeping an eye on the government - especially with a mainstream media that refuses to ask difficult questions - the better off we will be.

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So, counter to what some would say, I think that Brigette deserves a great deal of respect. She has made a peaceful, honest protest for the sake of her principles and the health of Canadian democracy. And she has done this in the face of considerable personal consequences. Perhaps instead of dismissing her as a misguided young hippie, more of us should follow her example and take meaningful action to fight for something that's worth fighting for.

Thanks for reading!

-Matt

(By the way, it's interesting: for Stephen Harper and Jack Layton, two guys who want to dramatically change and destroy the Senate, respectively, they seem to react pretty unpleasantly when someone else "disrespects" the Red Chamber. Funny how that works.)

Canada's Lopsided Parliament

Now that it's approaching a month after May's historic federal election, parliament will soon be convening. As is typical in Canadian politics, however, the body count in the lower chamber will look quite different from how the public as a whole actually voted.

In the graph below, the results of the May 2nd election (left) are compared to a hypothetical proportional representation system (right) in which seats are distributed to mirror popular vote share. As you can see, there is a wide discrepancy. 

Why might this be the case?

Most noticeably, Canada is one of the only advanced electoral democracies in the world that still uses first-past-the-post (FPTP) for its voting system. In each of our 308 ridings, the candidate who wins is simply the one who receives the most votes. This approach means that any votes in a riding where your favoured candidate didn't win are useless, as are any votes for a candidate who is at least a single vote ahead of all other opponents. Under FPTP, therefore, a party does not even have to win the most votes to win the most seats, if their support is concentrated in just the right way.

This arrangement benefits parties with strong regional support (e.g. the Bloc Quebecois, at least until this election...) at the expense of parties with moderate national support (e.g. the Green Party). Canada is notoriously regionalistic, and FPTP exacerbates this by allowing candidates to perform better by targeting swing voters in individual ridings than running a broadly appealing national campaign. The Conservative Party is highly adept at this, and they thus have the most efficient vote base out of any party. To illustrate:

This explains why the Conservatives have a majority with only a plurality of the vote, but it also explains why the Greens, with nearly as high a vote percentage as the Bloc, was only able to get one seat this election. It it because their support is spread more or less evenly across the country, but is not concentrated enough in any one riding (except Saanich-Gulf Islands) to win a seat. This makes a vote for the Greens, on average, worth 1/16th of a vote for the Conservatives.

Often it is the voters in the centre who tend to shift their preferences, and these voters tend to live in swing ridings. The result of this is that a minor shift in mainstream public opinion can cause a number of contested districts to change hands, and in Canadian political history has often led to landslide majorities without even a majority of public support.

However, this understanding of the limitations of FPTP does not tell the whole story. The Americans also use this voting system, most recently on a federal level in 2010's congressional elections. Their results, while slightly skewed toward the Republican Party, are still relatively balanced in the whole scheme of things. The main difference between us and them is that while they do indeed use first-past-the-post, they also have a two-party system. We in the Great White North are familiar with a phenomenon which they are not, known as vote-splitting.

Let's say that in the riding of Canadaville, 60% of voters are dissatisfied with Steve Tory, the incumbent MP. However, they cannot agree whom to vote on as an alternative. The voting might play out like this:

• Steve: 40,000
• Jack: 30,000
• Mike: 20,000
• Gilles: 5,000
• Liz: 5,000

Under FPTP, Steve still wins. If this happens in enough ridings (as has occurred particularly in urban BC and Ontario) then a party can win many seats even if most people despise them. First-past-the-post does not allow a "lesser of two evils" option.

As an alternative, we have only to look at other advanced democracies, particularly in Europe. A system of proportional representation (pick one, there's hundreds) would potentially mean that your vote would mean something even if you weren't in a swing riding or voting for a regionally appealing party. It would also have the advantage of making it easier, with more evenly distributed seats, for parties to cooperate and focus on issues with broad national appeal. To be certain, the current system does have its advantages insofar as having a local representative, et cetera, but I think the day has come where regionalistic majority governments without a true majority mandate no longer represent healthy democracy. Canada should take that step forward and make a system where all voices count for something.

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On a side note, since it has been in the news recently, I wanted to briefly mention the per vote subsidy that Harper has announced they will be phasing out as of this year's revised budget. Abolishing it really does fit in with that Canadian history of rampant regionalism. Since extra votes in winning ridings (or any vote at all in losing ridings) do not count for anything, and now that parties have no financial incentive to gain the support of as broad a public base as possible, expect more of the same district-by-district bribery that has been perfected under the Harper Government(TM). This also makes parties more beholden to the diehard partisans who contribute money, especially with the raising of the personal contribution limit almost a given. Parties like the Greens (and now the Liberals) with nascent or floundering fundraising capabilities will find themselves unable to keep up with those who have wealthy and generous donors.

To be honest, that last point really burns me. Regardless of what you think of the rest of his time as Prime Minister, Jean Chretien did a very noble thing in choking off his own party's funding stream by banning corporate and union donations. With the per-vote subsidy and the subsequent lowering of the personal contribution limit, it meant that people without money who voted for a particular party (and the party that spoke for their needs and concerns) had a more equal voice. Now what we are once again saying is "if you have money to spare on politics, your voice counts more". I didn't think that was the kind of society we were, but it goes to show what I know.

If you want my opinion, scrap donations altogether (talk about unwanted taxpayer support - most of it goes to the 75% tax deductions on political donations, which is far more generous than for charities), ban advertising between elections (no more smear campaigns, please and thank you), tightly define and limit the use of government resources to promote semi-political messages (such as the Economic Action Plan, which was heavily advertised and closely linked with the Conservative Party), and make parties solely dependent on a per-vote subsidy (if you want money, you've got to work for it, not just appease a wealthy core constituency). There's my two cents.


Thanks for reading!

-Matt

Election Aftermath: Dissecting the Results

"I'm not sure what hit me, but it was orange and had a moustache."

That might be what an astonished Liberal candidate might say at this point, having been thoroughly trounced in last night's election results.

I will admit that last night was not an easy time for me. Although there were elements of the results that I relished, several were quite painful and affected me emotionally in ways I didn't think politics could. I have committed myself in the past to being as neutral as possible when writing about these matters, but I am an opinionated (if not necessarily partisan) individual and I will express my feelings as appropriately as I can without skewing the factuality of this piece. Because the shifts we saw were so complicated and unexpected, I will break it down by party.

Conservatives


Well, Stephen Harper finally has his majority, and managed to eviscerate his hated Liberal Party in the process. I, along with many pundits and analysts, was surprised by this result. Polls had consistently shown him to be below both the vote and seat thresholds required to predict a majority government, so what happened?

In the starting days of the campaign, the party lost ground in the battleground provinces of British Columbia and Ontario. The Liberals had built up some steam and the contested seats that both parties were fighting for were looking like they might turn or stay red. When the NDP started its long upswing, however, the main impact of this outside of Quebec was to split the centre-left vote. The Liberals fell, and the Conservatives were able to gain enough votes to easily take advantage of their temporarily weakened rivals. Because they swept by narrow margins in Toronto, they were able to gain twenty or so seats with only a few percentage point increases in their popular vote share. Harper's strategy of running a low-key, consistent, and tightly controlled campaign was heavily criticized, but shored up enough of his votes to handily win against a divided opposition.

Will this lead to better policymaking and more civility in the government, or will this election have been a day of wild voting followed by a four year hangover? I'm inclined to think the latter, but I want to give Harper the benefit of the doubt in this new scenario so that it is not people like myself that start this new parliament on a sour note.

New Democrats


I guess since they are Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition now (well, soon), I suppose it's fitting to put them second on this list. For better or worse, anyone whose fortunes changed during this campaign (with perhaps the exception of Elizabeth May) owed it to Jack Layton. The NDP surge has remarkably redrawn the Canadian electoral map and, indeed, turned what was initially billed a snoozer into an exciting and unpredictable campaign.

For this party, the surge came around the French language debates, where Layton's casual (some say folksy) and endearing performance won him much support amongst Quebec voters. Additionally, his strong appearance on the popular show Tout le monde en parle cemented his viability as a social democratic alternative to the sovereigntist Bloc Quebecois. Given that his party and Quebec share many values, in a way it is not surprising that he connected - but the wider impact of this was to give the impression of NDP momentum in national polls when in fact they were only rising in Quebec. When voters elsewhere saw this rise, they largely jumped ship from the Liberals (some from the Conservatives) to a party they likely felt they could support without it feeling like a wasted vote anymore. This surge carried right to the end of the campaign, and in fact the NDP vote was even higher than polled. Many analysts predicted the opposite would happen - that these new New Democrats would not stick with their stated preference, since the young voters are notoriously volatile and the older voters might be concerned about fiscal responsibility and head back to the Liberals. This was a very reasonable prediction (one I shared) but it did not pan out, likely due to the weakened Liberal numbers at the end of the campaign and the belief that the Big Red Tent was about to be washed away by the Orange Wave.

The result of this was an unprecedented number of seats - the NDP's rise in the rest of Canada cemented their rise in Quebec and they soundly beat the Bloc Quebecois - the same Bloc, I remind you, that was thought to have a more or less permanent grip on two-thirds of Quebec's 75 seats. While they obviously did not form government, the NDP breakthrough in Quebec gave them more seats than the Liberals have had in years. Which takes us to...

Liberals


If there was any result of the evening I was most astonished at, it was probably this one. While the polls from the latter half of the campaign did not bode well for the party, I had no idea that their results would be this catastrophic. Talk of Ignatieff possibly reaching "Dion-esque" lows was quickly replaced by desperate attacks on health care later on in the campaign (which probably just helped the NDP), followed by a complete refusal to discuss polls and frantic urging for core voters to get out, followed by stunned and horrified silence. For those who passionately dislike the Liberal Party, I suspect this was a satisfying moment.

It was thought in almost all quarters that Ignatieff ran a very clean campaign, didn't completely humiliate himself in the debates, and at the very least had a more motivated and energized base than Dion did in 2008. I believe all of these factors to be true, so it raises the question of why the Liberal vote share dropped so dramatically. Once again, I believe the answer links back to the NDP, and to a lesser extent the Conservatives.

With the Liberals moving noticeably to the left in this election, Ignatieff's narrative was to define this race as between himself and Harper. This worked to a degree, and the NDP vote fell with much of it going to the Liberals in the first half of the campaign. The latter were especially competitive in Ontario by the midpoint, which, had the trend continued, could have allowed them to make considerable seat gains (I won't speculate, but a 10 seat gain wouldn't have been unreasonable).

However, the Ignatieff team underestimated the seasoned veterans they were campaigning against. By essentially throwing the policy ball into Jack Layton's court, all he had to do was pick it up and they were toast. Ignatieff did not do exceptionally in the debates, and so simultaneously failed to shore up his vote and failed to attract the crucial undecided crowd. That, combined with his stream-of-consciousness style speech-making, made it tough to stick to a central theme, and even tougher for the (shall we say 'lazy') journalists to pick out sound bites. Let's face it - smiles and one-liners work well on television, drawn out thoughts and stern lectures do not. When Jack began to climb the hill in Quebec, left-leaning Liberals and those frightened of a Harper majority sensed opportunity and calamity, respectively, and jumped ship.

What I can not explain is why the base just did not show. Possibly this was due to apocalyptic poll numbers and an increasingly desperate Ignatieff scaring people away from the party, but perhaps we will never completely understand all the factors that caused the Liberal vote to dry up. Since many of their ridings were narrowly held, the transfer of votes to the NDP and a moderately strengthened Conservative Party meant a number of losses that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Had the NDP surge not occurred, we would likely have had an Ignatieff-led minority government supported by the New Democrats. Funny how a French language debate can change things.

I will say as a final note on this party that I was saddened when I saw Ignatieff had not even won his own seat. As is Stephane Dion, Michael Ignatieff is an honourable man who was intent on serving his country. I have met him in person and he just does not fit the foul picture that Conservative ads have painted of him. He has given all his effort to the party and his leadership, and I had high hopes he would lead this country into a responsible and progressive future. For those who will gloat that he is going to move back to the US now, I shouldn't have to remind you that he only spent five years there, having spent most of his time abroad as a BBC journalist and teaching at Oxford and Cambridge. Additionally, although he did refer to America as "our country" (not that it wouldn't be Harper's wet dream to do the same...) he was always known as a Canadian and he referred to and understood himself as such. He has been involved in Canadian life from a very young age, having been the national youth director for the first Trudeau campaign. Although I understand that people's minds are largely made up on a man they barely knew, I hope that in his final days as party leader and leader of the official opposition we can be respectful and leave him to retire in peace. He has mentioned, by the way, that he wants to stay and teach in Canada. So there.

Bloquistes


This one is pretty easy to dissect. Over the years, as separation has become a less salient issue, Quebecers (largely a centre-left bunch) had parked their votes with the Bloc as a party that came closest to their values and brought the most benefit to their province. Duceppe obviously took these votes for granted, and looked almost bored during the campaign - there were times during the debates when I wondered if the usually feisty leader was asleep. When Jack Layton clicked, though, federalist Bloc voters found that they did have a choice, and it was revealed how little power the Bloc actually had. They were trounced by the NDP in almost every riding (including Duceppe's own) and reduced to a measly four seats. Much like the Liberals, this once-dominant party has now been more than decimated. What remains to be seen is whether they will be able to take votes back from the NDP (their drop was very sudden, unlike the Liberals, so they still have a powerful infrastructure), or whether they truly lack resilience and will cease to exist altogether (this largely depends on whether the NDP lives up to expectations, along with the random fluctuations of Quebec's bizarre psychology).

Greens


This was a satisfying moment for me, because the Green Party has broken a psychological barrier and is finally starting to make its not insignificant vote share count for something. Additionally, Elizabeth May is a courageous and honest campaigner whom I believe has the potential to build something of a centrist replacement to the Liberals if circumstances permit. However, the danger in their only having one seat is that while they have a moral victory, the Green voice is still very weak, and the fortunes of the party as a whole largely depend on the in-your-face May. If she ends up turning off too many potential voters, they could be out the door very quickly. Still, I see them having room for growth in the current political dynamic and this could well be the beginning of a bright future for them in Canada.

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Well, that's all for today. I realize I dipped a bit into partisanship, and for that I make no apologies. I am not afraid to divulge where my preferences lie when it will impact how I tell the story, and I will continue to do so where warranted.

For next time I want to focus on the failures of our voting system in this election, and I would also like to examine all parties but the Liberals in particular to see what kind of future is ahead.

Thanks for reading!

-Matt

Debate Night Commentary

Seeing how I have exams and an election is on, I will refrain from posting my second piece on income until I have some time to write it up well. Instead, I would like to talk a bit about the last couple of weeks and last night's leaders' debates.

Possibly the most noticeable shift of this campaign has been that of support from third parties to the Liberals and Conservatives. It's very clear that the message both of them are sending ("Majority or Ignatieff-led coalition" from the Harper side; "Red door or blue door" and other inane metaphors from the Grits) is sticking. The Conservatives are consistently around 40% support (which is a fair bit higher than they were going into this) while the Liberals are somewhere between 25 and 30 (pollsters disagree on whether they've actually moved since the campaign began).

One of the other shifts has been in perceived leadership traits. Ignatieff has shown improvement from his dismal numbers before the election started, likely due to positive media coverage and the pathetically low bar that was set for him. He has run a very open campaign, something that he has done in various ways since he became leader. It contrasts well with the Tory campaign, which has been criticized by journalists in particular (who are kept behind a fence at events and limited to five questions a day). That campaign has also been attacked by opposition parties for actions that include bouncing an undecided political science student who had a picture of her with Ignatieff on her Facebook page. This plays into the narrative that while the Grits are open to Canadians of all stripes, the Tories are secretive and excessively partisan; Liberals have been pressing the latter, but I do not think they have emphasized their own accomplishments in that area.

Otherwise, not much has happened. Policy announcements from all sides are a blend of uninspiring, unoriginal, and unrealistic. The ethics issue, despite the Conservative being peppered day in and day out with revelations of a less than perfectly run government, has not stuck. The just-leaked Auditor General's report on wasteful and potentially illegal spending for the G8/G20 summit might have some effect, but that depends on a lot of 'ifs' and we will not know until closer to the end of the campaign whether it will be a game-changer. The Tories have an uncanny ability to shrug off criticisms of their governance the way a labrador dries off after a swim.

Now, as for the debates: for those who have been watching the campaign to date, you will recognize pretty much everything that came out of everyone's mouths.

-Ignatieff lectured on ethics, democracy, and spending priorities

-Layton cracked jokes, made unrealistic promises, and delivered witty one-liners

-Duceppe brought up entirely unrelated points and asked what it all meant for Quebec

-Harper stared creepily into the camera, had a convincing (if not necessarily truthful) response to seemingly every criticism, and insisted that we would all be better off if we ignored the fact that Canada is a parliamentary democracy and crowned him emperor for life

On the whole it was a terribly uninspiring affair. I would be surprised if it changed anyone's voting intentions, since most of it was composed of the respective leaders' talking points. I was disappointed that Ignatieff really seemed to gravitate to the same sound bites that he delivered rather unconvincingly, rather than talk about substantial policy which he did rather well at when he attempted. As for Harper; despite the gravity of the criticisms against him, he seemed to brush it off almost effortlessly with a combination of policy competence and disdainful apathy toward the other leaders on stage. Despite the fact that they had some meaningful contributions, Layton and Duceppe really didn't control the debate - it was clearly a two-man contest (although to be fair they kept the main contenders focused on more substantial issues).

On the whole, the lack of a distinct turning point in the campaign so far or the debate leads me to believe we are headed for a parliament pretty much like the one we have now. I don't think Harper is headed for a majority: while it is by no means out of reach, he seems to have hit a ceiling and is simply not inspiring (some would say scary, I don't know if that's still the case) to the majority of the electorate. As well, his support has softened in Ontario, where many of the battleground ridings are. At the same time, while the Liberals appear poised to make some gains, there is no indication these will be significant - Conservative support is still too strong for any meaningful shift to occur. If the rest of the campaign runs like it has so far, expect a pretty familiar election result.

How disappointing.

Income

So, back from my long yet entirely predictable hiatus, I have decided to write a post rather fitting to the blog's rechristening. You see, I love all of the social sciences, and economics on its own can get a bit dry - in the same sense that I love broccoli on its own but would get sick of it within a week if I couldn't add in any other vegetables. I would much rather this blog resemble a tasty stir-fry than a plate of steamed broccoli.

With that metaphorical justification, I changed the title and focus of the blog to be less technical and more socially focused. Nowhere is there a better place to ease into that transition than in a discussion of income. Income, in this instance, takes on the economic definition which includes any money that is made from labour (wage/salary) or capital (rent, interest, profit) by an actor in the marketplace. Over the next few posts I am going to look at how to conceptualize income, how it compares across countries, alternate ways of measuring it, and what it means for people's lives.

Now, I'm sure you're all mostly familiar with Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It's the most common measure of economic output for a given country in a given year, and it is mathematically equivalent to income (because on the macro scale spending = output = income). One of the ways of measuring a country's wealth is by calculating GDP per Capita, which takes total annual output and divides it by the number of people. By this measure, Canada is one of the wealthiest countries in the world - but the real question on all of our painfully self-conscious Canadian minds is "How do we compare to the U.S.?"

That's right, your eyes don't deceive you: as per these recent numbers, we almost equal to our inherently superior Yankee neighbours! But the story doesn't end there, as that would make for a rather uninformative blog post. You see, this particular graph converts all numbers into US dollars. The problem with that is that the American dollar (USD) has been falling recently and has a habit of fluctuating to a considerable degree in comparison with the Canadian dollar (CAD). A more accurate picture, then, makes use of what is known as Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). This compares the countries by what goods and services can be purchased using the currency in each, rather than simply how many units of each other the currencies can buy. GDP, adjusted for PPP, is at once a more stable measure and one more indicative of what a person's dollar income can actually buy them.

Oh dear. What this means for us in practical terms is that our dollar is overvalued compared to the US dollar. Our wealth as measured in nominal (compared to USD) terms is deceptively high, likely the result of short-term exchange rate fluctuations that don't reflect real price differences. According to per capita GDP comparison using PPP, we are in fact much poorer than the first graph would let on.

Is this cause for panic? According to a measure that takes all the output in our economy, divides it by the number of people, and compares it by purchasing power, we are considerably below the US. Can you think of any reason this analysis might not give the whole picture as far as economic wellbeing goes? I think I'll pause here and give you some time to think it through and decide whether you ought to be donning your stars and stripes just yet. Stay tuned…

Youth (Un)employment

If you go to school and tried to get a job this summer, you may be feeling a little dejected at the moment. Like hundreds of thousands of other youths (grouped as 15-24 years old), you would be suffering from the phenomenon of youth unemployment which has been multiplied by the recession that we are still digging out of. According to Statistics Canada, the youth unemployment rate was 15.2% in April of this year, almost double the 8.1% of the adult population. Indeed: while the rate for those 25+ has remained relatively stable over the last year, the youth rate has climbed by 0.6% since last April.

Unfortunately, this is not a recent phenomenon. Historically, the rate has been significantly higher for young people than for older workers. The following graph shows the rate for youth compared with the rates for men and women over 24 years old.

As the green line shows, not only are young job seekers at a much higher risk of unemployment, but they also experience much sharper changes in its incidence. Recessions, as we shall discuss, have a disproportionately high impact on youth.

What are the reasons, then, that youth unemployment is so bad? Well, it helps to first define unemployment: a person is unemployed if he or she is looking for work but does not currently have a job. This allows for four basic categories:

- Frictional Unemployment occurs when people change jobs or are temporarily laid off
- Seasonal Unemployment refers to people who can't find work during certain times of the year, such as fishermen or ski hill operators
- Structural Unemployment refers to people whose skills simply don't match the jobs that are available in the market, or who can't travel to places where they would
- Cyclical Unemployment is based around the fluctuations in the economy; when there is expansion it decreases, and when there is recession it increases

As you might guess, youth unemployment is a function of all of these. Frictional unemployment is high among youth because the jobs that they take tend to be be low-paying, low-skill, and/or temporary. A natural consequence of this is a great deal of transitioning between basic jobs as well as between work and school. This in turn inflates the overall rate.

Unfortunately, it seems that we suffer from Seasonal unemployment as well. This is likely because, as millions of high school and university students get off school for the summer, the market gets very crowded. It stands to reason that we benefit somewhat from special temporary jobs as well as outdoor labour that become available in the summer, but if statistics from the last two years are any indication, that effect just isn't enough to compensate for the glut in supply.

As for Structural unemployment, that seems to be a problem more for new university graduates and those without post-secondary education. In the first case, many have degrees that employers have no use for. A striking example of this that I have read about is that of school teachers: even as grade school enrollment drops due to falling birth rates, teaching programs continue to take on high levels of students. The result is that many thousands graduate without any reasonable prospect of finding a job since schools are doing very little hiring. As for those without any post-secondary, they lack the skills needed for many full-time jobs - often going for long periods of time without them - and make up a disproportionately large section of total youth unemployment.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, we are very susceptible to Cyclical unemployment. When a recession happens, young and inexperienced workers are usually the first to lose their jobs since most workplaces are based to some degree on seniority. Additionally, while most Canadians are employed in relatively stable positions in stable sectors, young people tend to be employed in front-line service jobs, which are subject to much greater fluctuation in demand and can be added or taken away much more easily.

Now, with just these four categories we get an approximation of what we know as the unemployment rate. Personally, I would love to leave the subject here and say that we're in a pretty unpleasant situation, but that at least everyone who has a job is all right. Sadly, that is quite obviously not the case. Not only is a young person at a higher risk of losing a job, but even those with stable employment are often underemployed. This means that they do not get the quantity of work that they desire. Since a large number of young people are employed part-time, that can very easily be the case.

Even more worrisome, the jobs that youth hold are becoming stratified, which reflects trends in the adult labour market. New opportunities are now increasingly of two broad sorts: high-paying professional or technical jobs for educated workers, and low-paying, low-skill jobs for everyone else. Often young workers get caught in unpleasant working situations like the latter, but are much less likely than their more experienced counterparts to want to instigate change in the workplace, preferring instead to move somewhere else where they will encounter similar conditions.

While they may seem unrelated, the concepts of unemployment, underemployment, and poor working conditions are very significant problems that link into and feed off of each other. As education and skill become more essential in the modern labour force, youth who lack these get trapped in the typical pattern of part-time, low-skill jobs. Since these usually do not offer significant training or advancement, nor any guarantee of job security, frequent unemployment is common. One consequence of this is that young people are at a high risk of deteriorating work skills and self-esteem. These, combined with the 'tracking' effect of 'dead-end' jobs, can lead to destructive patterns of chronic joblessness, low productivity, and in the long term, poverty and emotional issues.

Are there any potential solutions to these problems, then? The answer is a qualified yes. Because of the complex nature of youth employment, different approaches must be considered and any policy introduced must be comprehensive and attempt to address multiple issues.

One idea that has been steadily gaining traction is that of apprenticeship or internship. Such a system is widely used in Europe, where it makes transitioning to meaningful work easier and improves the worker's skill set and productivity. Here in Canada we make some use of cooperative education (or work-study) programs, but it is by no means ubiquitous. Instead, we tend to rely more on piecemeal services to help students and graduates find work, which may or may not be temporary. An advantage of the work-study approach is that it helps to bridge the skills gap between the available jobs and young people who are to fill them. Many companies such as RIM (maker of the Blackberry) hire large numbers of Co-op students to take advantage of such a concentrated pool of potential employees, and will ask some to stay on after their term expires. It allows them to gain fresh perspectives and flexible labour in a relatively inexpensive manner, while still providing valuable training, which is why this system is popular with many large corporations.

A common approach, especially in more left-leaning countries, is the creation of public sector jobs specifically for youth, or incentives for private employers to hire them. This has the desirable impact of raising demand for young workers, thus generating more employment opportunities and better working conditions. While this has sometimes been criticized for simply being a 'make-work' project and not providing useful skills, it is still far better for our economy than chronic youth unemployment.

Another idea to combat the trap of low-skill work is a training tax credit. Countries such as France and Japan offer this credit to employers, who can deduct the expense of training from their tax bills. The main advantage of this approach is that it improves the incentive to give good skill development to employees, which is generally lacking in low-level jobs where there is high turnover. The problem, of course, is how one defines 'training' expenses. There is really no guarantee that money spent on training will have the desired effect on employees' productivity and skill sets. Still, it's an incentive that probably shouldn't be left off of the table.

Although large in scope, a more long-term solution focuses on ensuring continuous and comprehensive education strategies. By improving and diversifying our educational system and encouraging young people to stay in school (preferably until the completion of some post-secondary program), we prevent the worst of the youth employment scenarios and have a labour force that is far more qualified to face the working world. Of course, making education relevant and accessible takes effort, but it pays huge dividends in the long run.

Finally, a piecemeal approach to information is currently applied. Although governments provide some assistance for youth to develop skills and find good jobs, we are largely on our own. In what is a large, labyrinthine, and often intimidating market, I do not see how this could be a good thing. A more centralized training and job search mechanism would probably operate more efficiently by removing the numerous overlaps that exist while patching the holes that none of the individual systems seem to be able to fix.

Any strategy that we use to solve these issues needs to work to bridge that widening gap between where young people and their skills are, and where long-term career opportunities are to be found. Information, training, education, and experience are all important steps to alleviating the worst of youth employment problems. Indeed: any initiative should include most if not all of these if it wishes to have a significant impact. Although some local and provincial governments are taking steps (such as a high school graduation requirement of work and/or volunteer experience among other things) it may be that it is time for a national approach. Some federal politicians have spoken a bit about national education and training strategies, but it remains to be seen how such a proposal would fare against some of the more fiercely anti-federalist provinces, since education is a provincial jurisdiction.

Hopefully, though, we can put aside the petty squabbling and start to focus on long-term solutions. If young people are as important as everyone says they are, then that shouldn't be a problem.


Sources:

Drost and Hird, An Introduction to the Canadian Labour Market - 2nd ed.
http://www.ceocouncil.ca/publications/pdf/test_4bded24a37fe60442a52827488bce86f/JUN_85_ENG_Youth_Unemployment_In_Canada_The_Problem_And_Some_Possible_Responses.pdf
http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unyin/documents/ch02.pdf
Statistics Canada

Why HST?

Okay, I'm going to start my tenure as a blogger by addressing one of the most controversial tax issues facing Canada at the moment: the Harmonized Sales Tax, or HST. Here in BC it is particularly reviled, with around 80% of the public wishing it were replaced with smallpox or the bubonic plague. Even Ontario, which isn't particularly known for political activism, has demonstrated a rather unpleasant reaction.

What is the HST, anyway? Basically, about half of the provinces right now have their own sales tax, which is collected separately from the federal GST. For reasons which I shall get into later, three Atlantic provinces and now Ontario and British Columbia have entered into agreements with the federal government to have their provincial sales taxes (e.g. 7% in BC) merged with the GST (5%) to create a single sales tax (e.g. will be 12% in BC). This would mean that businesses only have to fill out one set of sales tax forms instead of two, which would be send off to the Canada Revenue Agency, which splits the funds and gives the provinces their appropriate share of the total amount collected.

So why all the hate? Well, for starters (and I apologize to those from Ontario, but I will mostly be using BC as a reference for expedience) Premier Gordon Campbell made an explicit election promise not to implement one. I find it rather odd that he wouldn't just come out and speak to its benefits, but then again, 'tax' may well be the new 'hidden agenda'; it's a hot potato that no politician would be caught dead with. The subsequent reversal on this promise within a very short time frame caused considerable anger. My understanding is that Ontario did not go about it in such a sneaky way, and yet they are still largely against it (about 70%, last I checked). So what else is causing the anger?

Aside from the aforementioned danger of using the word 'tax', the fact remains that people have focused in on what are considered some of the HST's uglier elements. Because the GST applies to a much broader range of goods, and because the provincial governments only have so many exemptions they can use, many things that were taxed under the GST but not PST (such as restaurant meals) will now be taxed by both. This means that prices on a few goods will go up by about 7% in BC and 8% in Ontario.

Additionally, the structure of the tax (again, more on this later) essentially means that statutory incidence - who technically pays it - shifts from businesses to consumers. Many are concerned that, while they pay more in tax on goods, businesses will be paying less and not pass on the savings. Later on I will discuss why this is not necessarily true.

Finally, it is often asserted that the tax will not be revenue neutral and instead be a net gain for government. I am going to dismiss part of that off the bat, as both BC and Ontario are going to be losing money with all of the credits and (in BC's case) income tax cuts they are using to offset it. Yes, you read correctly: the hated sales tax, promoted by greedy politicians who just can't get their hands out of your pocket, will be a net revenue loss. Whether or not it stays that way remains to be seen, but even if not I'm pretty sure we could find some schools or hospitals that could use the extra funds.

EDIT:


I must apologize, and correspondingly edit this post. I spoke with someone who has an intimate knowledge of finance and the manufacturing process, and she clarified just how the different taxes work. PST is currently not charged on any step of the manufacturing process, while GST is charged but later reimbursed. The main difference with how they function for businesses is that PST is levied on supplies and other things that are not resold or used in the manufacturing process, while GST is not. Since the HST is modeled on the GST, businesses would no longer be charged sales tax on anything that they purchase, thus saving them money. Theoretically, prices should fall as they did in the Atlantic provinces when the HST was introduced.