Roundup: A million imaginary vacant jobs

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The government’s new ads about their Apprenticeship Loan Programme claims that there will be a shortage of “one million skilled tradesmen and women” over the next decade. The problem? Well, there’s just no labour data to support that claim, whether you go simply with skilled workers period – not just the trades – or any other sector really. And once again we find ourselves in the position where the government’s advertising is completely out of tune with reality, from promoting programmes that haven’t had parliamentary approval, which offer benefits that most people won’t get because they’re specific or the thresholds are low, or the benefits of which are highly overblown. But hey, we remember the excuse that this was all about trying to instil confidence in the economy and so on, right? Even the government admits that they need better labour market data, and they’ve started two new surveys to help provide it, but this is also what their cuts to Statistics Canada has wrought. But incomplete data is one thing – complete fabrications are another.

Good reads:

  • Here are some more of the Maclean’s dispatches from Paris from Paul Wells and Nick Kozak, including Wells watching the far-right counter rally.
  • Stephen Harper gave a reasonably non-partisan speech about Sir John A Macdonald on the occasion of his birthday while in Kingston yesterday, along with a couple of other former prime ministers.
  • Murray Brewster looks at how the military has been routinely doing counter-intelligence work in the North.
  • Andrew Leach has questions about that Nature study where the media reported that we’d need to leave 85 percent of the oil sands in the ground to halt climate change.
  • Scott Reid considers how Harper’s incrementalism has changed how Canadians view government spending.
  • It sounds like the government is ready to table new legislation to expand the powers of preventative arrest after the recent rash of terror attacks around the globe.

Odds and ends:

Jennifer Ditchburn looks at some of the new online outfits covering politics differently. I’m still not sure that Press Progress is actual “coverage” and not NDP propaganda, however.

On his Northern tour, Justin Trudeau says he’s not there to make promises but to listen, learn and engage.