Economy Still a Sick Puppy

By David South

Id Magazine (Canada), December 27 to January 8, 1997

It was a year when banks recorded their highest profits ever; it was a year when the economy was supposed to be chugging along as the stock market hit new records. Despite our political and corporate masters telling us otherwise, government statistics tell a grim tale for anybody who isn’t making over $100,000. 

After years of being told high government debt must stop, all three levels of government managed to take debt up another $45 billion, to a record level of $796 billion. It makes you wonder what all the food banks, unemployment and poverty is achieving. 

Prime minister Jean Chretien’s rallying cry of “jobs, jobs, jobs” has not panned out. A combination of high levels of immigration, seniors clinging to jobs for longer and a growing working age population is keeping unemployment high. The percentage of the working age population employed is 58.5 per cent, according to Statistics Canada. It was 58.4 per cent in April 1992, before 944,000 mostly part-time jobs were created. Youth are the ones suffering the most, with only 52.3 per cent actually working, down from 62.7 per cent in 1989. 

If that isn’t evidence enough that 1996 was a bad year, according to the Labour Relations Board, more people are spending time out on the picket line. The number of days lost to strikes in 1996 was 1,783,700, up from 473,000 in 1995. The bulk of those days were lost in the crippling public servants and auto workers strikes.