Kevin Carmichael: The idea that Canadians need oil and gas to make a living overlooks the data – My Response – June 19, 2019,
Kevin Carmichael wrote an article I read on the Financial Post titled: Kevin Carmichael: The idea that Canadians need oil and gas to make a living overlooks the data in which a few points are made like the following:
StatCan counted 506,000 unfilled positions in the first quarter, a 10 per cent increase from the same period a year earlier and the most in any first quarter since the agency started publishing these data in 2015. So there is more evidence that the national labour market really is as hot as some of the too-good-to-true data from recent months suggest. “It’s a useful gauge of employer sentiment,” as actual job listings are more trustworthy than sentiment surveys, said Brendon Bernard, economist at Indeed Canada, a web-based hiring site. “It shows the strength of the labour market.”
Now, this portion of the article I partially agree with, however, the reality is far different, then the narrative Kevin Carmichael is trying to sell. The section below is what Keynesians have a hard time comprehending because they don’t see the correlation between welfare, regulations, free markets and human behavior.
Free-market types assume an unemployed person will seek out a job, no matter what. And the highly educated advisers of policymakers and executives assume everyone is as keen to leave home as they were when they set out to collect degrees and passport stamps.
Now, we all know the history of our ancestors, which in many ways mimics the behavior of refugees, who will view life from the lens of business. Humans even after graduating from school will look at wages and the responsibility of doing certain jobs. Many young adults collect degrees as stamps of achievement, to brag about to their friends and family, but many will graduate and abandon what they took in College primarily because they know either via on the job training or simply by hours of studying that doing particular jobs will be extremely stressful, adding to their perceived stress are government enforced regulations and the concept that if they make too much money they’ll be the targets of political attacks.
Why stress themselves out when minimum wages are higher and jobs that are easier to do and grant them more freedom and flexibility are plentiful. Why work harder when I don’t have too? If the government is providing welfare and pulling the levers in the free market to benefit certain demographics, why waste my time pursuing a career in a heavily regulated industry that’s only going to pay me a few thousand dollars more?
Canada’s has a free market filled with limited opportunities, Alberta is the closest thing to a free market Canada has, the oil and gas sector although not perfect provides opportunities not available in other parts of the country. Most Canadian males sometime during their life will consider moving to Alberta because as uneducated laborers you can become a millionaire working in Alberta. I know a lot of people who started businesses in Alberta who were uneducated, but because the Albertan economy is more Freer they were able to make more money with a less degree of stress than they would have been in provinces like Ontario or Quebec where voting could swing to the extreme left and regulate an entire industry out of existence.
In Quebec, if you include Crown Corporations, the vast majority of Quebecers work for the government in some capacity. WOrking for the government, working under a union is depressing, typically there’s some type of tenure arrangement, wages are controlled, there’s little to know the opportunity for advancement and often you have to go to school and get some type of government-approved certicficate and purchase a yearly license to move up the economic ladder. This is depressing, most people don’t want this lifestyle and most people when faced with this reality for existence will opt for less pay rather than being a government slave.
Even better is that Canada has a pretty generous welfare system if you meet the qualifications, namely you’re a single parent. Men typically don’t want to the higher paying jobs you’ll find on indeed because if you’re a highly skilled male in Canada you can make a hell of a lot more money either working for yourself are moving to the United States. Women and this is not being sexist, simply aren’t as driven as men are and employers are usually reluctant to hire women because of the potential legal ramifications if they do.
Women take more time off work, complain more on the job, male and female interactions in the modern social justice era cost employers a lot more money, because they have to face the reality that if a female employee perceives an interaction with a male employee to be unacceptable the employer is going to have pay to remedy this situation. SO in many ways employers have raised the barrier to employment because of governments involvement into the economy, furthermore because the government has made it more expensive to hire and to fire employees, employers have to be very selective in their hiring process.
Then you have the BoC lowering interest rates, which raises the cost of leasing property and there’s the carbon tax which raises the cost of energy consumption for business owners, all of these government initiatives lead to employers being more selective with who they hire. Keyesians and socialists tend to believe that there’s isn’t a trade-off when the government intervenes in the free market.
No, employers aren’t stupid, employers will, of course, post jobs but as the government adds layer after layer of regulations, employers will have to add multiple layers to their hiring process. Furthermore, potential employees will be more selective with who they choose to work for, because if let’s say I just came out of college and I have a limited supply of companies I can work for and maybe this limited supply of companies want me to do more work while at the same time paying me entry level pay and thee are other less stressful jobs that I could do that pay me near what I would make at the higher paying job, if moving isn’t an option for me I’ll choose the less stressful job.
Nurses are fleeing British Columbia, why? Because of regulation and STRESS, I always say that it’s not all about the money, most humans just want to live comfortably and the job atmosphere in Canada favors Welfare recipients and low-skilled less stressful jobs. This is what people mean when they say destroying the Oil and Gas sector is going to be very destructive to the Canadian economy. There free market in Canada has been dying ever since Pierre Trudeau, but if you were to only look at the numbers, you see a different story, because artificially created inflation skews the numbers and also skews the data.
Most of Canada’s inflation you have to remember is artificially created. By almost every metric we Canadians enjoy a greater standard of living than Americans do, yet the Canadian dollar is lower than the U.S dollar, why? Because we’ve manipulated our currency to appease to grow and pay for our public sector, by doing this many industries have been forced to conform and adapt Canada’s full embracement of Keynesian economics. Keynesian economics is a slow death, it’s life support economics, the economic killer is no longer loud and boisterous, no in a Keynesian economic system, the economy killer is silent, the fish rots from the head down and personally the mere fact that Justin Trudeau whose weakness is economics is the Prime Minister of Canada is a clear sign to me, that the Canadian economy is going to be headed for troubling times, that’s going to catch a lot of people off guard.
In short, I’d like Kevin Carmichael, not to use the wors free market when describing Canada’s economy. In Free markets, prices spike and they crash, in a free market deflation isn’t frowned upon, deflation is nothing more than a fire sale, deflations are good and hen people are used to them, people don’t worry about them as much, but this modern-day Canadian economy revolves around inflation and government intervention into the economy, welfare for all is the motto, the rich are evil and should pay their fair share is the motto for most politicians, there’s a tradeoff for this type of thinking and the tradeoff is fewer innovations and a service sector economy.
If you kill oil and gas in Canada, well hope for an uneducated becoming a millionaire just got smaller which is not good for the psyche, because when people feel like they have to be smart in order to be wealthy, you get a lot of resentment in society and this historically has led to societies declining. What makes a lot of young people hopeful for the future is the idea that they can become rich by doing anything, in America you’d be surprised some of silly idea that made people millionaires, many of these ideas available in America have been regulated out of existence in Canada, health care in Canada as an example is controlled by the government.
Regulations equate to the barrier of entry being raised, meaning a basic innovating, job-creating idea just became complicated. Sugary cereals are basically banned in Canada, in Quebec they have a maple syrup cartel, supply management is a reality in Canada, these regulations create problems that otherwise wouldn’t exist and force people who could work for these companies to either be on welfare or limit their job or entrepreneurial aspirations. This is depressing and these frivolous regulations in time lead to economic stagnation, that the numbers can’t predict, because the data is comparative to historical norms.
Most innovations are based on prior innovations and if a particular innovation isn’t allowed to exist in Canada, there won’t be an evolutionary process for that innovation, nor will there be an alternative for it.In closing do not overlook the importance of Alberta’s oil and gas sector! It’s more important than most people realize!