Austerity’s Discontents

Hennessy's Index is a monthly listing of numbers, written by the CCPA's Trish Hennessy, about Canada and its place in the world. For other months, visit: http://policyalternatives.ca/index

• 75 million

  Number of youth, aged 15-24, who will be unemployed globally this year. That’s 6% more than in 2007. The global youth unemployment rate is 12.7%. (Source)

• 46.4%

  The 2011 youth unemployment rate in Spain, up from 18.2% in 2007. (Source)

• 13.9%

  Canada’s youth unemployment rate in April; nearly twice as high as the 7.3% rate for the overall labour market. (Source)

• 20.4%

  Percentage of Canadian youth, ages 15-24, who fell into Statistics Canada’s broader category of unemployed, including discouraged, waiting or involuntarily part-time workers in April. (Source - in CANSIM, click add/remove, click ages 15-24, see category R8)

• 6.4

  Number of unemployed Canadian workers for every reported job vacancy. (Source)

• 40%

  Percentage of unemployed Canadians who are actually eligible for Employment Insurance. (Source)

• 30%

  Pay cut the federal government expects Canadians to accept if they’ve been on Employment Insurance for 7-18 weeks (7 for ‘frequent’ claimants, 18 for ‘occasional’) and are offered a lower paying job than the one they had before. (Source)

• 29,600

  Estimated number of full-time federal public sector job cuts by 2015, following three rounds of cutting.  (Source)

• 100,000

  Number of total jobs the Parliamentary Budget Office estimates will be lost in Canada by 2014-15 as a result of federal and provincial government cutbacks. (Source)

• 105,000

  Number of Ontario public (65,000) and private (40,000) sector jobs the Centre for Spatial Economics estimates will be lost in 2015 due to provincial government cutbacks. (Source)

• 100+

  Number of days Quebec students took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands to protest austerity budget proposals that include raising tuition by 75% over several years. It has culminated in a controversial emergency law limiting public protest and a youth movement dubbed Printemps érable. (Source 1, 2, 3)