Minister Arsenault is quoted in the government press release saying he is encouraged by the latest labour force survey data. I realize this is likely a boilerplate term but he is encouraged by this: Employment Growth Rate – May 2009…
Continue ReadingA curious anomoly
Apparently NB SMEs are very confident about their economic prospects. The CFIB is reporting that SMEs here have high levels of confident and growing while in Nova Scotia there is a low level of confidence and it is declining. The…
Continue ReadingAtlantic cooperation unlikely
My old friend Peter Lindfield lays down some options for streamlining government service delivery in his column today ranging from program redesign to Atlantic cooperation to outsourcing. I am not particularly knowledgeable about two of the three but I do…
Continue ReadingBlog moderation blues
As anyone who has posted a comment here knows, I have to approve the comments. I had to take this step a few years ago after certain anonymous commenters had introduced a level of lingustic nastiness that was unacceptable to…
Continue ReadingWant to get engaged?
The former head of UNB gave a speech over the weekend where he called for dramatic change. He thinks we need “new institutions” and that the “role of government needs to be retaught”. I only met Dr. McLaughlin a couple of…
Continue ReadingAerospace on PEI
This is kind of interesting. File it under taking sector development seriously (cluster development): Grade 11 students at Three Oaks, Kensington and Kinkora Regional high schools near Summerside, PEI will be able to register for the Aviation-Aerospace Academy Diploma program.…
Continue Reading28,076
From 1981 to 2008, this is the net loss of people aged 18-24. Specifically it is the total number of net people in that age group that left the province over the 27 year period. Assuming those folks earned the…
Continue ReadingThe export bandwagon deconstructed again
The TJ has a story this morning talking about NB’s robust forecast for exports over the next couple of years. I have no problem with the content of the story up to this point when the expert states: “New Brunswick…
Continue ReadingA bilingual society
This is a good step. http://www.gnb.ca/cnb/news/edu/2010e0804ed.htm We talk about a bilingual society and then spend almost all our time and effort keeping French and English apart. Our schools, media, cultural instututions, and just about everything else is either English or…
Continue ReadingNB in 2050
The subject of my column today in the TJ. I find predictions of the future fascinating because they are almost never right. I heard a guy over the weekend on a Big Ideas podcast saying that the UN population forecasts…
Continue Reading