I thought we were getting some traction. With a number of good columnists like Alec Bruce and even old Bill Belliveau making solid points. A few bloggers saying the right stuff.
But the mainstream media just doesn’t get it.
And neither, I’m afraid to say, does the government. Same crap, different day.
New Brunswick’s labour force dropped by an estimated 9,400 people from Feb 2006 to Feb 2007 on a seasonally adjusted basis (not the 5,400 reported by the T&T). The only province to register a decline in labour force year over year and likely the biggest single drop in recent history (I never checked but in my experience that kind of drop is unprecedented).
And the mainstream media writes:
NB jobless rate hits record low (T&T)
Unemployment rate hits 30 year low (TJ)
Capital region’s unemployment rate down to 5.7% (DG)
Cripes, only the good old CBC – the source many of you like to crap on – actually reported the real story – the 9,000 drop in the labour force.
The good Lord help me, I’ll be an advocate for the CBC till the end of my days.
The Irving papers served up our old friend Samuel LeBreton with a rosy reporting – glossing over the decline in labour force.
And the government? The group talking about self-sufficiency? I’ll let you judge for yourself:
“The fact that nearly 360,000 New Brunswickers were working in the province last month is an indication that our plan under the Charter for Change, to make economic development a priority again, is starting to show results,” Doherty said. “We have a clear plan for making job creation a priority again, which I believe will yield real results over the long term, and these early results are encouraging,” Doherty said.
Unbelieveable. That’s the only word for it. Here Doherty and gang have a golden opportunity – hard data – to push their case for New Brunswick needing a serious economic makeover (you have been reading the Self Sufficiency stuff, no?) and they lob this crap on the people of New Brunswick.
Reading the local rags, every New Brunswick with half a brain will think things are booming. After reading stories in all three English rags, you would hardly have any sense of the seriousness of the labour market problems.
We are still friggin’ stuck in a 1980 mentality when everything rose and fell based on your unemployment rate.
Let me tell you something. The low unemployment rate in New Brunswick is a sign of the weakness of the economy, folks. The weakness. And not one bureacrat, one friggin’ newspaper and not one friggin’ pundit gives a rip. Only the oft maligned CBC got it right.
9,400 working age adults leaving the workforce in one year is a crisis – a never before seen crisis in New Brunswick. If those 9,400 New Brunswickers were working in New Brunswick and made just the average full time income, that would add $385 million per year in payroll to the provincial economy. That would add over $70 million per year to the tax coffers of the province.
And all the media can rave about is the unemployment.
Unbelieveable.
We deserve our fate. We really do.