Statement made on 29 October 2009 by Senator Jerahmiel Grafstein (retired)
Hon. Jerahmiel S. Grafstein:
Honourable senators, I have a question for the Leader of the Government in the Senate.
A consensus appears to be developing on the sluggish recovery of the economy. Economists appear to be in a strong consensus that there is a jobless recovery. A careful examination of the testimony by the Governor of the Bank of Canada, both in his recent statements and at the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce, indicates the same thing — there is a clear consensus that the recovery is sluggish at best and is not working.
Other economists have said the action plan is not working, and a consensus is developing that we have a jobless recovery. To give some solace to the government, the jobless recovery is as intense in the United States as it is here.
One vital piece of information to help the government and public policy-makers determine how to best target job recovery appears to be missing, and it is the statistics themselves.
Earlier this week in The Globe and Mail, there was an article entitled "Hidden jobless cloud economic picture." The article reports that economists are frustrated, in effect, by the lack of clarity about the joblessness and the quantum of people on the welfare roll. I will not reiterate the entire article that appeared in The Globe and Mail on October 27.
Let me give you a couple of brief quotations:
"We don't know whether people are departing for new employment, or if they are exhausting benefits and persisting in the unemployment pool — and that is problematic," said Grant Bishop, an economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank. "There could definitely be better disclosure."
Gilles Seguin, another expert who worked on welfare information for the federal government from 1975 to 2003, said:
"There's no public national source that tells us how many people are on welfare right now."
The article goes on to say:
Case loads are climbing, however, as hiring remains sluggish. In Ontario, the number of welfare cases reached 238,598 in August, the highest since March 2000.
The question I have, in a nutshell, is: When will the government make available to the Senate accurate statistics, province by province, region by region, about the number of unemployed in this country, those people leaving the welfare rolls, adding to the welfare rolls and those people who are exhausting their EI benefits?
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