Questions?
Comments? E-mail Robert T. Chisholm, Associate Member OSPE, at attention_to_the_facts@hotmail.com
A1.5 ADDITIONAL INDICATIONS OF
FLAWED APPROACH TO DATE; SOME CAUSES OF THIS; SOME REFERENCES.
Reference: “Statistics
Canada failing to tell whole story about Canada’s job market, CLC says” –
by Julian Beltrame, Canadian Press, March 6, 2014
Other references –
books:-
“Poor-Bashing” - The Politics of Exclusion”
Jean
Swanson. Published by “Between the Lines”, Toronto, 2001 (5th
printing, September 2004)
“The Truth About Canada”, by Mel Hurtig
“A
Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada”, by John Ralston Saul
“Beyond
the Crash” by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
“Work and Labour in Canada:
Critical Issues” 2nd edition, Andrew Jackson, 2009
Also 1st edition, 2005. Canadian
Scholars’ Press Inc., Toronto.
3rd Edition, James Lorimer & Co. Ltd.,
Toronto, 2000
There is a 4th edition available,
published in 2011
“Tragedy in the
Commons”, by Alison Loat and
Michael MacMillan, founders of the non-partisan think tank Samara.
Random House Canada;
First Edition (April 15 2014)
Many quotes relevant to the subject matter in this
website can be given from all the above works. It is important to note what
they don’t say - as much as what they do say.
Example 1: Richard Bitner’s book “Confessions of a Subprime Lender” doesn’t explicitly mention the obvious failure of the U.S.
government and the U.S. business community to pay proper attention to the jobs
question, as a prime cause of the sub prime mortgage mess in the U.S. and its
worldwide fallout. While this obviously has nothing directly to do with Canada,
Ontario or the NCR, it has important lessons concerning what can and will
happen anywhere in the world if there is no proper attention to the jobs
question.
Example 2: “We cannot afford to waste lives or be
lazy and sloppy”. John Ralston Saul, “A
Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada”, page 310. Yet in Canada this goes on wholesale, with
millions of people constantly being hornswoggled out of having a job, denied
access to retraining and/or denied access to benefits altogether, all aided
and abetted by un-thinking bureaucrats and lawyers in the federal H.R.S.D.C.
and their administrative tribunals (the Board of Referees and the Umpire’s
office), the Social Benefits Tribunal in Ontario, the Ombudsman’s
Office in Ontario, and so on - all aided further by government-financed
lawyers concerned only with the “letter of the law” as an excuse to
prevent solutions to a problem when
they are told about it.
A number of reviews of this book are available at http://administrativejusticereform.ca/unjust-by-design/
A main point of the book
concerns the Workers Compensation Boards. The Workers Compensation Boards deal
mainly with people unable to work because of physical injury sustained in or
out of the workplace.
Problems with the other administrative tribunals already referred to do not
“qualify” for cover up and inaction any more than the Workers Compensation
Boards problems, no matter what current social mores and prejudices in Canada
might suggest.
Questions?
Comments? E-mail Robert T. Chisholm, Associate Member OSPE, at attention_to_the_facts@hotmail.com
A documented set of instances involving a series of
failures to apply satisfactory standards of professionalism, in Canada’s
administrative justice system, is reported on this website under the
following:-
A1.4.
FOREIGN TRAINED PROFESSIONAL IMMIGRANTS TO CANADA; “PROMISES”; CONTRACT OF
EMPLOYMENT “FIDDLE”.
It involved a case where the problems began with the
individual affected being wrongfully dismissed after being enticed from the
U.K. by the employer concerned to work in Montreal, Quebec. This ultimately set
in train a string of events years later involving incompetence on the part of
federal and Ontario provincial bureaucrats. These bureaucrats were working for
the federal Board of Referees, the Office of the Umpire and a
lawyer working for H.R.D.C.’s Legal Services Department concerning an Employment
Insurance claim; these problems were later aggravated by certain
Ontario provincial bureaucrats working for the Ontario government’s
Social Benefits Tribunal and the Office of the Ombudsman. The end
result was to effectively prevent the individual concerned from working and
contributing to the tax base, aggravated by a vexatious claim against him on
account of an alleged social benefits “overpayment” when he had been forced to
seek social assistance after being denied access to retraining in order to get
back to work, and this after being forced to leave a certain employer in
December 1994; the employer just referred to was not paying him due to
impending bankruptcy.
The lessons of Ron Ellis’
book apply as much to the NCR as they do to Ontario as a whole and Canada as a
whole.
Questions?
Comments? E-mail Robert T. Chisholm, Associate Member OSPE, at attention_to_the_facts@hotmail.com
An example of a different
kind, involving attempts to deny the existence of a significant high tech
unemployment problem in Ottawa, is the following:-
Reference:
"Steering on Black Ice…", Carleton University, June 2005
This concerned the
continuing unemployment problems from late 2000 onwards in Ottawa’s high tech
sector. Obviously this concerns the NCR
in particular - but the lesson for Canada as a whole is that “public voices” of
the kind referred to must NOT employ emotion, or exploit popular misinformation
and wrong analysis, in order to obfuscate and down-play localized unemployment
and under-employment problems when these happen as a result of industry
down-turns.
Quote:-
"One of the least impressive features of the Ottawa
experience was the way in which politicians, business leaders and some media
editors tended to minimize, or obscure, the scale and negative effects of job
loss in the tech sector. Apparently not able to break their habit of boosterism
honed during the tech boom, these public voices would accept a number no
higher than 5,000 net unemployed tech workers. Aided by the efforts of the
Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation, the City’s economic arm, to present
the most positive tech employment numbers possible, and in the absence of
comprehensive, ground-level survey data, this figure was maintained in public
discussions for several years."
End of quote
This localized experience in Ottawa, among other things, is analysed
further in Sub-Appendix 1.5:-
A1.5. ADDITIONAL INDICATIONS OF FLAWED APPROACH TO
DATE; SOME CAUSES OF THIS; SOME REFERENCES..
O.C.R.I., unfortunately, was one of these sources of the said "boosterism". The start of the "tech crash" in
Ottawa in late 2000/early 2001 coincides approximately with when Jeffrey Dale
became the head of O.C.R.I. He, in turn, was succeeded in 2009 by Claude Haw
who stepped down in 2011. He in turn was succeeded by Bruce Lazenby. Then in
2012, O.C.R.I. was re-tasked and re-named "Invest Ottawa".
All of them seem to have mis-understood the problem, based on the
available information being either incomplete "at source", wrongly analysed “at source”, or both. In the
following newspaper article, dated
January 4th 2014:-
Reference: “Hi-tech industry's
future bright in Ottawa” - Ottawa
Citizen January 4, 2014
This,
again, refers specifically to the NCR and constitutes another example of
potentially dangerous mis-information given to the public. In this case it
comes from a business leader who seems to dismiss past events and the people
affected as being “over and done with” and hence “...unimportant now…” , so as
to cause the people affected to be “forgotten” as “unimportant” because they “...should all have moved on….”
notwithstanding the obstacles constantly put in their way and the legalistic
chicanery partly responsible for the said obstacles.
Bruce Lazenby, President of Invest Ottawa, speaks of a "burgeoning" high
tech sector in Ottawa – as if the problems between late 2000 and January 2014
never in fact happened, making it appear that the people caught in the layoffs
in years past, and not able to get work, can simply be ignored. So he seems to
be working under the same mis-apprehensions as his predecessors Jeffrey Dale
and Claude Haw.
Another far more dangerous example of the popular
mis-apprehensions that were being disseminated, in this case involving Claude
Haw in 2009, is given in Sub-Appendix 1.2:-
A1.2. MORE ABOUT OTTAWA’S HIGH
TECH UNEMPLOYMENT PROBLEM
A1.2 (B) CLAUDE HAW, PRESIDENT OF THE FORMER O.C.R.I.
Claude Haw, P. Eng (Ontario), was President of the former
“Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (O.C.R.I.)” before it was re-tasked
and re-named “Invest Ottawa”.
The mis-apprehension just described was
embedded in Claude Haw’s thinking even after the efforts, years before, by the
“Ottawa Business Journal” and their “Time for an Upgrade” series of articles
from January 2006 up to and including their 2006 Summer Supplement which
included the article “Is There or is There Not a Skills Shortage? ” by Jeff
Pappone. One of the people interviewed for that article was Gary Davis. Mr.
Davis was the Director of the then-Ottawa Talent Initiative (O.T.I.) which was
trying to help unemployed Ottawa high tech workers get re-employed.
In Canada there are additional very serious general
problem areas with getting work, in the NCR and in Canada as a whole.
(a) Advice given to job seekers. This involves gross over-emphasis on resume writing, interview technique and other aspects of “appearances” with no attention to fixing the problem of supply versus demand for jobs, which in turn means making the economy perform properly. It boils down to false pretences that people who can’t get jobs must be in trouble exclusively because of personal deficiencies – for which the “cure” is endless attention to “appearances” in all their aspects.
(b) Excessively long lists of mandatory requirements for positions and sometimes unrealistic requirements – as a cover-up for the problem of inefficient job markets that nobody wants to deal with, coupled with widespread absence of any on-the job training by employers. The “excuse” proffered for this is job markets constantly being super-saturated with between 70 and 5,000 people competing for the same job, every time one is posted.
(c) Lack of access to government–funded retraining caused by dysfunctional rules and regulations connected with federal E.I. and provincial social assistance programs, aggravated by the operations of certain government-controlled administrative justice tribunals.
(d) The above factors have produced an additional
problem, first reported in 2005:-
Reference: “Some job candidates getting too slick for interviewers”By VIRGINIA GALT, Globe and Mail, Monday, Feb 7, 2005 This is also referred to elsewhere, in Sub-Appendix 1.6:- A1.6. IMPORTANT ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS LEFT UN-ANSWERED
(e) In general, people don’t realize (or don’t want to
know) that a key problem in job hunting is how to optimize the trend in one’s
personal bank balance - so as not to fall victim to un-informed and incompetent
accusations of not managing one’s personal affairs, losing control and then
being classed as a “dropout”, or some such.
Optimising one’s bank balance trend actually represents an un-solvable
math problem for most people out of work because it involves probability,
chance and statistical analysis. This
means that there is never a 100% guarantee of any success within any specified
time frame. Hence traditional criticisms directed at people out of work are
both un-called for and incompetent.
Items (a), (b), (c) and (e) immediately above are also dealt with further in Sub-Appendix 1.6:- A1.6. IMPORTANT ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS LEFT UN-ANSWERED
The flawed approach to job
hunters and unemployment just described has been in use in Canada since at least
as far back as 1982.
Questions?
Comments? E-mail Robert T. Chisholm, Associate Member OSPE, at attention_to_the_facts@hotmail.com
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