Political columnist David Schreck reports in a September 10th entry on his website Strategic Thoughts.com that government ads boasting about B.C.’s employment growth paint a far from accurate picture.
“Released on September 10, just 4 days before Financial Minister Gary Collins’ First Quarter Financial Report is due, Statistics Canada’s August Labour Force Survey doesn’t seem to be ‘on message’ for the Campbell government. Since July the unemployment rate increased from 7.3% to 7.7%, and employment fell by 14,500. Over the Labour Day weekend government ads boasted about B.C.’s employment growth. Less than a week later the numbers came in showing B.C. in 9th position in terms of employment ‘growth’, and in 5th position in terms of unemployment.”
“The Labour Force Survey is a telephone survey of households which, as its name suggests, measures the labour force. Its notion of employment includes self employed and unpaid household workers. The Survey of Payroll Employment, Earnings and Hours is a survey of employers. It measures paid employment. B.C. has not done as well in terms of paid employment as it has in terms of the much broader Labour Force Survey definition of employment. The most recent Survey of Payroll Employment, Earnings and Hours is for June. It shows B.C. in 7th place in May to June job growth. Growth in paid employment in B.C. has fallen behind the average for Canada for the three years since Campbell’s New Era began.”

With only 256 days to go until the next provincial election on May 17th, 2005, VanRamblings continues in its efforts to bring you real information on the British Columbia economy, not the claptrap that you read in the CanWest Global newspapers.
Because this proved to be an unusually busy summer for the administrator of this site, we’ve not only failed to publish daily on occasion, but have been somewhat lax in keeping up with our regular perusal of favourite websites. As such, VanRamblings has missed a couple of important stories, one of which we’ll bring to your attention below.
The catchphrase currently in vogue with the right in British Columbia (it apparently tested well with the public in focus groups paid for by the provincial Liberal party and their supporters) is: “The B.C. economy is turning the corner.” Not has turned the corner, but “is turning the corner.”
Not so, according to the Columbia Journal’s Marco Procaccini, writing in The Tyee. According to a recent report issued by Statistics Canada, B.C.’s economy continues to fall behind the rest of the country.

The report says the unemployment rate in B.C. kept rising to 7.8 per cent in May, up from 7.7 per cent in April — an overall continued increase since 2002. In the spring, when summer hiring often causes a brief jump in new jobs, it says B.C. suffered a net loss of over 15,000 jobs.
Statscan also says while consumer spending, which dropped substantially in 2003, has improved slightly since the beginning of the year, the increase is minimal and the economy remains, overall, stagnant. It also reports that overall consumer savings in B.C. have now dropped to the lowest in the country.

In 2003, B.C.’s personal savings rate as a percentage of disposable income was the worst in the country at negative 8.2 percent.
Meanwhile, with nary a peep from the media, the Liberal government continues to increase B.C.’s long-term debt, soon to hit $40 billion.
Apart from the government’s declaration of a fatwa on the province’s economy, the Gordon Campbell Liberal administration has devastated the social infrastructure of our province, as they set about to pay off their rich friends. Seven Oaks magazine offers a partial list of legislation enacted by the government as part of their regressive class war agenda. Worth a read.

B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell and Bushie – one and the same

Ran across a raft of new British Columbia-oriented sites today, beginning with B.C. Lie-berals – Bad For B.C. Listed on the site are links to B.C. Citizens for Public Power, Vancouver Tourism.biz, B.C. Bush, an archive of one of the low moments of our Premier’s life, and oh so much more.

Celebrating 15 years of cultural resistance, Canada’s largest political arts festival, the Under The Volcano festival of Art & Social Change, will be held again this year at Whey-Ah-Wichen (Cates Park), in North Vancouver, on the traditional territory of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, Sunday, August 8th.
A child of Vancouver’s active indie music scene in the late 1980s, and largely youth-oriented in it’s early days, Under the Volcano has emerged as a successful and enduring cultural tool to educate and inspire alternatives to the overwhelmingly oppressive forces of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism.
For those living in, or near, Vancouver, see ya there next Sunday …