MarkG

You mean it was Harper that knocked oil down from $100+ a barrel to $40?

Is there nothing that man can't do?

BTW, is there supposed to be a bright side of layoffs and a bad economy? I suppose it's good if you're rich and can buy up a lot of assets cheap...?

paw339

78c for me Last night in Calgary

Novocastrian

No, it was Harper who bet the whole Canadian economy on the gamble that the price would stay over $100. The tar sands yield the most expensive to produce oil and were clearly going to become useless first.

Now look what's happened.

JonboyE

The Canadian dollar went up so much on the back of oil that a shed load of manufacturing jobs in Ontario and Quebec went south to Mexico?

Pulaski

Coal, gas, and ore did the same thing to the Ozzie dollar, .... and entirely eliminated the Australian car manufacturing industry.

JamesM

Not to mention the scale of environmental damage that has been done by the tar sands either.

Alan2005

Tbf, they were heading there anyway. Western countries can't compete on wages, let alone working conditions and environmental protection.

Pulaski

That is not entirely true, and the margins by which production in a low-labour-cost country is more profitable are much lower than they were just a few years ago. My part of the US lost a lot of cotton mills and the economy languished for more than a decade looking for new industries and employers.

Now new employers have started to move in to the area, and a number of them are ...... cotton mills! The difference? The new mills have modern, reliable machinery, that need fewer staff and less maintenance, and it turns out that much of the issue with the old mills that failed was as much chronic under-investment as it was low wages in completing countries.

Edo

They say 2016 is going to be worse....

Alan2005

Yeah, for sure manufacturing won't disappear. The UK always had the same said about them; "We don't make anything anymore" "it's all service industry" etc. None of that was actually true.

But anything that is highly polluting / labour intensive always carries a risk of being off-shored if the volumes are high enough. And some of that will only have been brought forward because of the strong loonie.

(source: my armchair)

scrubbedexpat091

I don't see any break down by race, but generally first nations have the highest rate overall compared to the general population.

Novocastrian

Yes, that's what I meant. But Harper (being representative of Canadian ingenuity) figured that being hewers of wood and exploiters of stuff under the ground was a good idea.

WTF, I'm out of there.

scrubbedexpat091

I saw a story on manufacturing about a candy company who was having financial issues, and bought by a private investment first, who closed the plant down for 1 year, modernized it and then opened it again and its profitable again, granted they went from 400 some employees to 12 employees which likely helps profits.


Took this town about a decade to somewhat recover from the exodus of industry in the late 90's into the early 00's.

The recovery is largely in the form of being close to Vancouver for commuters, and housing being 500k-600k instead of 1 million, and retail jobs at Wal-Mart, Home Depot and such.

Town will never be a place where people live and work in the community like it was with industry and is not a commuting town, but it did recover and is growing...

Now if housing ever collapses in Vancouver, the desirability of this place will likely do the same, most come here simply for lower cost houses and a 1 hour commute time.


Local worker wages have collapsed a great deal, but overall average wage is high as it's inflated by out of town workers who commute and tend to be in the 6 figure range income wise...

Largest employers who are not a government entity are Wal-Mart with 150 roughly employees, Home Depot with 100 and Save On Foods with 100. The next largest is Squamish Terminals (shipping port) with around 75 and another grocery store with 75 and the trash company with 75.

Gov't agencies are by far the largest employers, but are mostly skilled like nursing, teaching and such.

plasticcanuck

And, who is they?

Novocastrian

I've mentioned that so many, many times before that I couldn't bring myself to do it again.

But yes of course.