“It’s very quiet now”, the agency receptionist told Ben, while pointing to a book to enter his details. “Please call me when anything comes up”, Ben replied, shaking his head from left to right as he enters his information into the agency diary. This is the common response Ben got when he went job hunting last week after unsuccessful job search online and having his email account flooded with the reply; “Unfortunately, we found a more experienced candidate, we are unable to offer you the position at this point in time. We will keep your information …”

However, whether Ben was qualified or unqualified, job shortages or losses are not limited to temporal and part time jobs as house hold names like General Motors, Chrysler and Canadian Television (CTV) also answered present in the job loss roll called with even far reaching implications.

More job losses have been projected for CTV due to drying up of advertising revenues as a result of reduced profits for businesses, reflected in the laying off of staff and a reduced demand for part time and temporal workers. Due to the reduced spending power of Canadian job losers and cautious spending of job owners, businesses can’t step up their profit margins and afford enough money to do more adverts and employ more staff. So one thing leads to the other, that is, everything being equal, no jobs leads to reduced spending, which leads to reduced profits for businesses, which leads to job losses and back to no jobs as it goes round and round like some kind of, permit me call it an “economic cycle”.

The Harper’s government through the Economic Action Plan, hope to break this “economic cycle” by reducing the tax burden on businesses and $20 billion in additional personal income tax relief for Canadians. $7.8 billion in home renovation job creation through; a Home Renovation Tax Credit scheme to motivate Canadian home owners to apply for incentive to renovate their homes, social housing projects, houses for seniors and disabled people and $12 billion in new major public works projects. Canadians who lost their jobs or accept to “job share” will be supported through an Employment Insurance scheme and $7.5 billion transitional support available to the battered automotive, forestry and manufacturing sectors. Credits availability made affordable through Export Development Canada and Business Development Bank of Canada. These plans look great on paper, but the questions that keep popping up in my mind are: With the usual government bureaucracy, how soon will these grants touch the hands of Canadians? How accessible will these grants be to needy Canadians? What proportion of the needy Canadians can be reached to create an impact and break this “economic cycle”?

The recent G20 summit hammered on effective bank monitoring (although Canadian banks are better off at weathering the economic storm) and further fiscal stimulation of the economy, coupled with the Canadian Economic Action Plan, is hoped to break this “economic cycle” and reverse the trend of job losses as well as reverse the response of the agency receptionist from; “It’s quiet now”, to; “It’s getting busy, can you please fill out our application form”; and to; “It’s busy, what type of job are you looking for”, thereby putting a smile on Ben’s face. The smile we all long for sooner than later!

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Tags: ctv, economic action plan, recession, stephen harper

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 10:01 am and is filed under Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.