It's The Economy, Stupid

I used to gently poke fun at New Brunswickers about their voting preferences. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s they would consistently tell pollsters their top concerns were jobs and the economy (and, typically, health care) and, yet, when it…

As Sam croons in Casablanca, sometimes a kiss is just a kiss, a smile is just a smile. Sometimes a data point is just a data point. We can certainly unpack it, analyze it, set it in context, look at…

Statistics Canada has come out with “experimental estimates for business openings and closures for Canada, provinces and territories, census metropolitan areas, seasonally adjusted”.  The data is through April 2020 so we are starting to see how Covid-19 is impacting the…

A couple of years ago, international man of mystery, David Hawkins, conducted a series of focus groups with young people about what they thought of the ‘call centre’ industry as a career in New Brunswick. Most of the feedback he received…

Stephen McNeil will be immortalized for telling everyone to “stay the blazes home” to stop the spread of Covid-19.   The Premier announced he would be stepping down last week.  How did the economy do under his leadership?  Did it ‘blaze’?…