Skip to main content

Employment in Canada

Well both the US and Canada published their new job numbers for January, while the number in the US at 236k was respectable Canada's number at 51k was a blow out.  Amazingly, this is as if the US had created 500k jobs in January -- so it gives a sense of proportion.

Canadian unemployment trend



The big winners were Ontario +30k and British Columbia +20k.  The big looser was my province, Quebec, that saw virtually no growth.  No point in "pointing fingers" the current government's policies (especially on language) is doing a great job at pissing off people that would/could create jobs here.  Its not that they are "socialists" is that they come across has having only electoral priorities.  It may not work out for them.

However, for Canada overall the news is excellent   One of my new favorite blogs Sober Look has an excellent piece about Canada -- interesting though process, some of the analysis is incorrect, but still generally valide.   His overall point is that America is awash with oil (true for the time being) that Canada's cost base has risen (as the CAD has risen) and that housing is now much more expensive than in the US (not true for most of the country).  Still the new governor of the Bank of Canada will have his work cut out.  Right now the Canadian Government is looking at a rosy scenario; employment is up, more Canadians are looking for work.

Good news

Although this will not help the CAD which remains weak against the USD.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu