The last time I posted to this blog, it was May of 2009. There was a lot of positive rhetoric floating around. Canada, they said, was not quite so bad as our G7 counterparts. Our country had shown relatively cautious and restrained fiscal practices and, resultantly, our public and private sectors had come out looking much more intact than those in the United States, the United Kingdom, etcetera and so on.
Back then this was a blog about infrastructure. Swept up in the gold-toned, postwar-esque rhetoric of Canada’s Economic Action Plan, I was anxious to chronicle and comment on such issues as student transportation, electrical grid mechanization, and scientific research facilities.
Over the past year – a period in which university and work demanded far too much of my time to update this web page routinely – we have seen that hopeful discourse, rife with terminology like “Rebuilding” and “Stronger,” become imbued with a kind of cynicism I never thought I would see myself beginning to display.
April’s edition of the Statistics Canada Economic Observer was released very recently, and contained news with serious implications for my demographic of young service professionals leaving university to enter the white-collar labour market. While it did announce that March showed promise, economically – employment overall rose by 0.1 per cent – that small growth was embittered, somewhat, by a couple of related figures:
- Employment within service industries (which constitute the vast majority of Ottawa’s job opportunities) actually fell during March, losing one-third of the upward gains it achieved over the course of the two previous months.
- This slight positive gain can be attributed entirely to increases in part-time employment. Full-time employment fell – again, after March growth, ironically mirroring the service industry’s discouraging reversal over the same period of time.
Yesterday evening I was speaking with a long-graduated acquaintance who said he had heard that this year is “even worse than last year” for Generation-Y professionals seeking entry-level positions. He was saying that this could, perhaps, be accredited to some sort of economic ripple effect in which a company is first hit by financial difficulties and then, only after a period of attempting to cope, decides it must scale back employment and staffing measures.
