These subcategories reflect a review of major themes in story content. Industry, Commerce & Labour includes: Labour, Employee Rights, Agriculture, Ranching, Economic Policies, Banking and Canadian Mint
Indsutry, Commerce & Labour
| wdt_ID | Details | Author | Date of Publication | Media Outlet | Title | Category Name | Story summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | More details | Carol Goar | 08/04/1986 | Toronto Star | No kudos for Ottawa's manpower effort | LABOUR, EMPLOYEE RIGHTS | The last time the government did a comprehensive survey of public attitudes toward Canada Employment centres was in 1981. Goldfarb Consultants interviewed 2,000 individuals and 300 employers. Their findings, obtained by The Star through the ATIA, are sobering: More than half of Canadians believed that Canada Employment centres did a fair-to-poor job in helping the unemployed find work. Among those who had actually used the service, the disapproval rating rose to almost two-thirds. A majority of Canadians (59 per cent) said their local manpower office would not be the first place they would go if they were looking for a job. |
| 2 | More details | Susan Delacourt | 04/07/1988 | Globe and Mail | {*} Hundreds placed in low-skill work 'Job development' scheme provides staff for stores and fast- food firms | LABOUR, EMPLOYEE RIGHTS | Hundreds of chronically unemployed people have been sent to work by Ottawa - under a program that promises to give them new skills in innovative projects - in fast-food restaurants, variety stores, car washes and even bingo halls. The scheme is a part of Ottawa 's Canadian Jobs Strategy. It is supposed to provide new work skills to people who have been unemployed for 24 out of the past 30 weeks and offers employers a wage subsidy to hire them. However, the list of private-sector employers who received job- development funds shows that at least 2,900 of the 17,000 jobs have been in places that traditionally provide low-skill employment. Much of the list, obtained under the ATIA, reads like a catalogue of typical summer jobs for students. Many of these are national franchise chains such as Burger King, Swiss Chalet, Pizza Delight. |
| 3 | More details | Graham Fraser | 03/03/1993 | Globe and Mail | Widening split along class lines revealed by proposed UI changes; Research shows fear of increased workplace harassment | LABOUR, EMPLOYEE RIGHTS | Ottawa's proposals to change unemployment insurance revealed a widening split along class lines in Canada. Public opinion research last December for the Department of Employment and Immigration found a significant majority of Canadians thought the changes would put too much power in the hands of employers, that it would be very likely that women who were sexually harassed would be afraid to quit their jobs, and that the changes are a clear departure from the Canadian tradition of providing income support for the unemployed. But this analysis of public opinion came two weeks after Finance Minister Donald Mazankowski announced on Dec. 2 that those who left their jobs voluntarily would no longer be eligible for unemployment insurance. |
| 4 | More details | Barrie McKenna | 02/02/1994 | Globe and Mail | Work sharing fails to save many jobs; Study says costly program postpones layoffs, encourages inefficiency | LABOUR, EMPLOYEE RIGHTS | A multimillion-dollar federal work-sharing program does little to make companies more productive and may be wasting money because many employers use it to postpone layoffs rather than save jobs, an internal audit shows. Nearly a third of workers paid by Ottawa to work less while their employers weather hard times lose their jobs anyway and end up back on the dole, according to a 1993 evaluation report for Employment and Immigration Canada. Out of a total of 177,800 workers who participated between 1989 and 1991, the program saved 62,800 jobs through the depths of the recent recession, it says. |
| 5 | More details | Kirk LaPointe | 28/02/1994 | Ottawa Citizen | `Manipulation' found in jobs programs; Capital region's student program worst offender, audit finds | LABOUR, EMPLOYEE RIGHTS | Political patronage was rife in the national capital region's summer student employment program, an internal audit found last year. Patronage -- where "who you know made a difference -- plagued programs across the country, the Public Service Commission report found. The report widely criticized the way jobs were handed out, the way records were kept and the way the programs worked out. Overall, "there was little monitoring and "insufficient data to assess what was actually occurring with the hundreds of millions of dollars set aside for the programs. "There was insufficient data available to conclude that the program was meritorious, said the audit, obtained under the ATIA . |
| 6 | More details | Peter O'Neil | 24/08/1994 | Vancouver Sun | Link of welfare moms, child-care availability queried in test project | LABOUR, EMPLOYEE RIGHTS | A $70-million federal pilot project in B.C. and New Brunswick questions the assumed link between the availability of child care and the huge number of single mothers on welfare. The project, run by a non-profit U.S. corporation, offers to double the salary of a randomly selected group of welfare mothers willing to take a low-wage job to enter the workforce. A report on the project's first year says just under 10 per cent of the single parents in the Lower Mainland and in New Brunswick cited a lack of child care as a barrier to working. “Child-care needs, which had been thought to be a potential barrier to participation, has not surfaced as a problem at anywhere near the level that people had predicted,'' an official with Human Resources Development Canada, said in the report, done by a Vancouver-based company established by Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. of New York, and obtained via the ATIA |
| 7 | More details | Dean Beeby | 04/07/1995 | Canadian Press | Labor dispute overhangs P.E.I. bridge project | LABOUR, EMPLOYEE RIGHTS | Ottawa and Prince Edward Island are locked in a jurisdictional tug-of-war over just whose laws govern the workers building the giant bridge to the mainland. And if Ottawa wins, the company creating the 13.5-kilometre structure could be hit with a massive overtime bill when construction ends. Strait Crossing Joint Venture has signed union contracts that stipulate a 50-hour work week with a scheduled 10 hours of overtime, for a total of 60 hours. The contract conforms with PEI's labor laws, which allow for a 50-hour basic work week. But the federal Human Resources Department insists that the interprovincial project falls under the Canada Labor Code, which sets out a maximum basic work week of 40 hours. Letters and legal documents were obtained by CP. |
| 8 | More details | Eric Beauchesne | 28/01/1997 | Ottawa Citizen | Costs of unemployment disputed: Top bureaucrat argues putting jobless to work doesn't boost economy as much as some claim | LABOUR, EMPLOYEE RIGHTS | The Finance Department's top bureaucrat says the costs of high unemployment are a lot less than have been claimed -- in part because the people who become unemployed are less productive when they get back to work than are other employees. ``It's not necessarily that they're all stupid or whatever,'' the deputy Finance Minister said in an interview. ``As you push down that unemployment number, you begin to run into all sorts of constraints that simply lead to people being less productive.'' He was responding to questions about a memo he wrote to Finance Minister Paul Martin, obtained by Southam News under the ATIA. In the memo, he says ``the productivity of the unemployed workers is typically much less than the average worker.'' |
| 9 | More details | Eric Beauchesne | 05/07/1997 | Ottawa Citizen | Government urged to cut EI premiums further: Report warns about effects of surplus revenue | LABOUR, EMPLOYEE RIGHTS | Employment insurance premiums could be cut much further than planned without putting the fund at risk even if the jobless rate bounced up to a 50-year high, internal government documents argue. Further, the report of the fund's chief actuary, say there's no need to let the fund grow beyond $15 billion, a level that it will reach before the end of 1998 if the government doesn't cut premiums further than it has promised. The $15 billion is at the upper limit of the prudent range for the fund, according to the report, obtained under the ATIA. ``There does not seem to be any need for exceeding an absolute level of about $15 billion,'' says the actuarial report, given to Finance Minister Paul Martin before his decision to merely trim premiums and let the value of the ballooning fund rise to an estimated $16 billion by the end of 1998. |
| 10 | More details | Dean Beeby | 07/11/1998 | Canadian Press | Survey of staff suggests lack of confidence in ethics of managers | LABOUR, EMPLOYEE RIGHTS | Many of the civil servants who process employment-insurance claims have little faith in the ethics of their bosses, said a poll of more than 1,000 workers in 15 offices of Human Resources Development Canada. It found bureaucrats reluctant to report breaches in workplace rules because they don't trust their supervisors. "Employees are not convinced that they can report suspected contraventions without fear of reprisal and do not necessarily believe that there would be open discussions of these suspected breaches," says an analysis of the survey results. The findings are contained in a report the department commissioned from Decima Research. |