A report Tuesday morning seems to show that Canada is losing medium-skilled jobs at an alarming rate and the system is ill-equipped to move workers to where they are needed, including high-skilled positions in other industries.
The new report from the C.D. Howe Institute, a Toronto-based economic think tank ascribes the drop mostly to the commodities price crash, which the institute says is exposing glaring holes in Canada’s labour market.
The job market is also not keeping pace with the "changing times," according to the report. Signs of weakness abound, including a growing share of people doing part-time and other "precarious" work, a near-doubling of long-term unemployment since 2008, and diminishing medium-skilled jobs.
The report's authors maintain the problem isn’t just the oil shock. Globalization, technological change and the aging population are all putting strains on the labour market.
One of the authors went on to say the solutions include overhauling employment insurance to eliminate regional differences in eligibility rules as well as a renewed effort to "up-skill", in his words, the work force.
He also called for putting much better labour-market data into the hands of employers and policymakers, while helping to bring "underutilized pools of labour" into the work force, including young workers, immigrants and aboriginals.
One of the authors called on the federal government to take the lead in fixing the flaws in the system.
"It is a very Canadian challenge in that no single level of government is responsible for labour market policy and this can lead to an absence of leadership," he said.
