Tag: employment

Asked and answered

Here is the new leader of the NDP, Thomas Mulcair in his first Question Period as leader of the opposition,

Questions about middle-class jobs. That was only a few days ago.

This morning, Statscan had welcome news for Canadians,

OTTAWA – After months of stagnant or even falling employment, Canada’s economy began churning out jobs again last month — and in a big way — adding 82,300 workers to the labour force.

The eye-popping gain, almost all in full-time work, was about eight times economists’ expectations and dropped the unemployment rate two notches to 7.2 per cent.

Of those numbers, 70,000 of those jobs are full-time.

Of course, if the NDP had their way their would sap the Canadian economy of its ability to attract investment and capital.

Anyhow, Thomas Mulcair’s NDP released a new ad this morning as well. Mulcair promises to build a more green and prosperous economy. Unfortunately for him, today was not the best of days to release an ad contrasting his economic vision with that of the real economy.

CBC cuts

To address their $171 million budget shortfall (total budget just north of $1 Billion), CBC has made a number of cuts.

From what I’m hearing, job losses will affect Windsor, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Québec City, Moncton, St John, Sydney, Corner Brook, Labrador, Gander, and Grand Falls.  Two one-person bureaus in La Ronge, SK and the Thompson, MB bureaus will close.

Television programming will be affected as CBC cancels Steven and Chris, and Fashion File and reduces budget for 22 minutes, Little Mosque on the Prairie, The Border, Being Erica, Living In…, Fifth Estate (20% budget cut), and Marketplace.

The state broadcaster has recently faced criticism from the Minister of Heritage concerning their American programming.  The network has committed a freeze on purchasing new US television programming.

CBC.ca is receiving more funding as more content as more audience goes online for content.  More bandwidth will be purchased for audio/video streaming and a focus will be placed on user-generated content.

CBC radio will cut The Inside Track, Out Front, In the Key of Charles, The Point, and The Signal (weekend edition).  The Current will have its budget reduced by 10%.

On the French language side, Téléjournal‘s show will go from 60 minutes to 30 minutes, Windsor morning programming will be replaced by Toronto content.  Saturday’s programming is also cut.  Ottawa’s noon news program will also be axed.

The cuts are focused more on television than radio.  CBC still will not sell advertising on radio although they are cutting 121 total jobs in that department.  In the Maritimes, 26 jobs are cut from CBC Radio.

CBC Sports will cut 313 jobs while CBC News (English) will cut 80 and will face a budget cut by $7 million.  The CBC will drop showing Toronto Blue Jays baseball, will reduce coverage of figure skating, soccer and world aquatics and will significantly reduce coverage of amateur sports.  Also, 20 communications jobs and 12 marketing have been cut.

More cuts will be announced soon as CEO Lacroix has deemed that the network will shrink by 800 jobs total (out of 10,200 total).