Not News to Us.

“The unemployment rate for the Stratford-Bruce Peninsula economic region increased from 5.4% to 6.1% last month, led by a loss of 3,500 jobs in trades and 1,400 in educational services.” This area includes a wide geographic area and does not properly reflect the Grey- Bruce part of that “economic region” in my opinion, we may not have “lost” as many jobs simply because there have been very few in this area to loose and the unemployment numbers are suspect in that they do not generally include the thousands that have not been counted due to having long ago run out of EI and despite still wanting a job cannot find any to even apply for!

A young man in our family in the trades who was laid off due to “lack of available work” and who exhausted his Employment Insurance many months ago who has been looking for almost any full or part time job recently attended an information session for a new national parts and surplus store being opened in our area shortly. He tell me that the two day session had several hundred attending on the day that he was there and after a couple of interviews received yet another “thanks but no thanks” letter. He was told he had many of the qualifications required but others “were more qualified”, this for an entry level warehouse / clerk type position. Looking at the local job listings I cannot fault him for not finding a job, there are simply no jobs to be had, and most of the few that are available require speciality certification or training, there are not even any jobs bagging groceries to be had!

Our fact spinning PM and his mouthpieces are crowing that "Under Conservative economic leadership, we had strong economic growth in June, exports are up — particularly in manufacturing — and now we've seen that Canada created over 50,000 full time jobs last month," Oh wow! 50,000 “new” jobs across a country the size of Canada and the unemployment rate ROSE to 7% And a loss of 42.000 (part time) jobs offset this number for a net gain of around 12,000.

Meanwhile here in Ontario the job losses in just trades and educational services exceed that considerably with the loss of 6,900 and 23,300 jobs respectively. Hell the job losses in just our economic region alone is almost half that at 5,300, so don’t tell me about a slight rise in the number of jobs across the country, the miniscule gain is totally meaningless to those in this area who cannot find work.


Oh yes and the budget is balanced and we are not in a recession and Harper puts no limits on who attends his election 'photo opportunities' and how may questions he will answer!