Article

Canada's unemployment mosaic in the 1990s

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the author.

Abstract

The national unemployment rate is a mosaic of many pieces. Some areas of the country, for example, demonstrate stability, but other regions are much more variable. Metropolitan areas in general tend to show wider fluctuations, though their unemployment rates are usually lower. These differences have important consequences for the country. As the economy improves, certain regions tend to develop shortages of particular kinds of workers. At the same time, unemployment remains stubbornly high in other areas. Although unemployment rates have fallen in most regions, these declines have been mostly moderate, so unemployment dispersion has risen only slightly. The lowest unemployment rates remain well above those of 1988 and 1989, and the location of the tightest labour markets has shifted from southern Ontario to the West.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.

... 84 During a serious economic recession in the early 1990s, unemployment rates were above 10% in much of the country. 85 Between 1989 and 1994, Ontario lost 189,000 manufacturing jobs, which accounted for 80% of the province's job losses. 86 Although the unemployment rate decreased in the mid-1990s, part-time and temporary work grew considerably. ...
Article
Full-text available
Family law in many countries has changed radically since the 1960s. However, despite family law’s central importance, few detailed quantitative analyses of the relationship between legal developments (landmark judgments and statutory changes) and the amount and subject of family litigation have been made. We examine this relationship using a unique dataset of citations among Canadian family law judgments from all levels of the court hierarchy. The network analysis draws attention to significant changes in law and legal practice over time. Not only did litigation increase overall, but the number of judgments involving multiple legal issues grew dramatically in the mid-1990s, signaling the increasing complexity of litigation surrounding family breakdowns. We probe this emergent co-occurrence of legal issues using citation network analysis and find clear links to the jurisprudential changes introduced through the landmark 1992 judgment Moge v Moge and the 1997 Federal Child Support Guidelines.
... In Canada, this took the form 53 An Act to amend the Divorce Act, the Family Orders and Agreements Enforcement Assistance Act, the Garnishment, Attachment, and Pension Diversion Act, and the Shipping Act of massive cuts in federal funding affecting many social services that followed shortly after the implementation of the Canada-USA Free Trade Agreement of 1989 and again, after its successor, the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 [263]. Canada also experienced a serious economic recession in the early 1990s, and unemployment rates were above 10% in much of the country between 1990 and 1994 [264,265]. For example, Canada's manufacturing heartland of Ontario lost 189,000 manufacturing jobs between 1989 and 1992, accounting for 80% of the province's job losses in those years [266]. ...
Thesis
Full-text available
Humanity's understanding of complex societal phenomena is still in its infancy, and there is much to discover about the organizing principles governing social life on Earth. How do societal structures such as social hierarchies form, and under what conditions do these structures remain stable versus become unstable and collapse? What is the structure of the jurisprudence that regulates modern human societies and how does it evolve in time? In this thesis, I apply quantitative analysis and modeling approaches from physics and network science to investigate these questions. In Part I, I develop simple models of the formation and stability of social hierarchies and compare their results to interaction data from animal societies and proxy data from human societies. The models are based on pairwise interactions between randomly-selected individuals that result in exchanges of societal "status." Following many interactions, a distribution of status forms, the shape of which ranges from egalitarian (many individuals with near average status) to very unequal (many low status individuals and a few high status individuals), depending on the model parameters. An Arrhenius relationship between a characteristic time controlling the evolution of the status distribution and the model parameters quantifies "long-lived" status distributions which appear to be stable in time, but in fact are not. In Part II, I analyze citation networks of court decisions (judgments) in the areas of family, bankruptcy, and defamation law, using unique datasets covering all levels of the Canadian court hierarchy (trial, appellate, and Supreme Court of Canada). In each network, judgments are "nodes" and judges' citations of past decisions are directed "links" between nodes. Despite the legal differences between the three areas of law, many large-scale network properties are similar. However, one can use refined network tools (clustering methods) to draw out differences in the datasets and interpret them in relation to legal developments (landmark judgments and important legislation) in the specific areas of law. This leads to an in-depth examination of the influence of landmark judgments and statutory changes on the explosion in family litigation that occurred in Canada in the 1990s.
... Windsor, a city in decline, had an unemployment rate of 11.5% in 1993 (Gower, 1996). A larger casino therefore meant more jobs while being privately operated meant being more competitive with the rival Detroit casinos on the horizon. ...
Article
Full-text available
Casino development is a popular strategy for urban redevelopment in declining cities. I examine the process of casino acquisition in the former Canadian automotive capital, Windsor, Ontario – one of the first cities in North America, outside of Atlantic City and Las Vegas, to host a resort casino. Drawing on 20 interviews with urban elites and the local news media, I explore the interplay between a local growth coalition and State interests in the development of Casino Windsor. To capture maximum revenue for provincial coffers, provincial interests used competition between economically depressed cities to co-opt the Windsor casino alliance’s project . Windsor’s urban elites, however, continue to “talk” urban entrepreneurialism, perpetuating the myth that municipal entrepreneurialism was an effective strategy for this struggling city. These findings suggest that the importance placed on the entrepreneurial capacity of local growth coalitions in urban redevelopment studies may be misplaced, especially in peripheral and declining cities.
Article
As much as 1994 was a year of strong economic growth with major employment gains, higher average earnings and reduced unemployment, 1995 was a year of weak performance. Output growth slowed very early in the year mainly because of reduced exports to the United States but also because domestic demand, which had started the year on an upswing, quickly responded to the slower economic activity with lower consumer spending on durable goods. The increase in employment was less than one-quarter of that recorded during 1994 and mostly in less lucrative part-time work. The unemployment situation hardly moved as more people, especially youths, stayed away from the labour force.
Article
he unemployment rate is a well-known baro- meter of labour-market health. The rise in the national unemployment rate in the years immediately following the high-tech meltdown has been replaced by sustained annual declines, resulting in a rate of 6.3% for 2006. This is not only below the 6.8% registered during the boom, but a 30-year low as well.1 Of course not all parts of the country have shared equally in the improvement. Some have done better, others worse. Normally, comparisons involve the 10 provinces or 5 regions of Canada, but within each, many distinct labour markets can be found. This article focuses on the 28 census metropolitan areas (CMAs) and the 10 provincial non-CMA areas (see Data source and definitions). Using the Labour Force Sur- vey (LFS), the article first tracks unemployment rate dispersion for local labour markets (CMAs and non- CMA areas) between 2000 and 2006. It then examines the comparative labour market performance of these areas based on unemployment rates and rankings, and unemployment duration. Unemployment levels, labour force, and employment are provided in an appendix. Unemployment rate dispersion rising The impressive performance of the national unem- ployment rate in recent years hides considerable geo- graphic disparities. For example, in 2006 the unemployment rate in the Québec CMA averaged 5.2% compared with 8.4% in nearby Montréal. Simi- larly, the unemployment rate in Kitchener (5.2%) was much lower than in Windsor (9.0%). That the unemployment rate will differ by geographic area is generally understood. All things being equal, the dispersion is expected to narrow in periods of eco- nomic growth, when the national rate is usually falling
Article
While the growth rate in the goods sector exceeded that of services in 1994. the latter has been the exclusive source of overall employment growth so far in 1996, as it was in 1995. The 1980s pattern of a generally more rapid growth in part-time employment seems to have become less stable in the 1990s. In 1994, full-time employment growth vastly exceeded that of part-time employment. There is some evidence that the dominance of fulltime work may be repeated in 1996, though not as markedly as in 1994. The national pattern of employment growth is by no means reflected in the paths followed by individual provinces. Some of the Atlantic provinces are seeing faltering employment growth in 1996, while Alberta and British Columbia continue to create employment. Ontario shows little sustained growth and Quebec has suffered recent declines. The movements in the employment rate show that what strength there has been in employment creation, has barely exceeded population growth for some of the major demographic groups. Only adult women have regained the employment rates they experienced at the beginning of the 1990s. These slow movements continue to be evident in 1996. Throughout the 1990s, the labour force participation rates for the major age/sex groups have continued either to remain stable or to decline. For women this lack of growth has been in contrast with earlier decades. Men between 25 and 44 have been experiencing sustained declines for the first time. The unemployment rate, at least until June 1996, has shown little movement since mid-1995, staying within the 9.2 to 9.7 range. The June estimate of 10.0% deviates from the trend. If the changes noted in the June LFS prove to be fleeting, 1996 may unfold the way 1995 did. If the May-June changes prove to be more lasting, 1996 may well end up being an even slower growth year than 1995.
Article
Contemporary Law and Society scholars emphasize focused study of “law and the economy” yet empirical work on the legal implications of important economic transformations of the late twentieth century is limited. To address this issue, I analyze Canadian wrongful dismissal claims heard to judgment between 1981 and 1997 to understand how judges grappled with contradictions that arose between classic legal doctrine on the employment relationship, unstable economic conditions that limited employment opportunities for plaintiffs, and new business ideologies about employee expendability and flexibility. Findings demonstrate that judicial rhetoric was attentive to the contradictions that arose with the new economy, and unique responses were developed. These responses, however, varied according to specific socioeconomic contexts embedded within the seventeen-year period under study. I conclude by suggesting the development of more dynamic theories of law and the economy to capture the ways in which law shifts in response to changing economic contexts.
Article
Canada’s generally good labour market performance over the past several years, exemplified in a 33-year, record-low unemployment rate, masks strikingly large regional disparities. In September 2007, the national unemployment rate was 6 percent, but it ranged from 2.8 percent in central Alberta to 17.8 percent in southern Newfoundland and Labrador. Such wide variances are also present within single provinces, from 5.4 percent to 12 percent in New Brunswick, for example, in that same month. These statistics suggest rigidity in Canada’s labour market. The economy creates jobs at a rapid pace, but people do not readily move to where the jobs are, leaving large pockets of unemployment. And hence our economy as a whole does not achieve its full economic potential.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.