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BAD ANALYSIS AND BAD REPORTING BY STATISTICS CANADA ABOUT 
CANADIAN UNEMPLOYMENT.
 
The following newspaper article quotes a Statistics Canada report.
 
Older workers more secure, but harder to re-employ
Long-term unemployment down from early '90s high, Statistics Canada says
 
Eric Beauchesne
 
The Ottawa Citizen
 
 
Thursday, April 22, 2004
 
 
Older workers are less likely to be laid off than younger workers but once they are, 
they tend to remain unemployed longer,a new study of long-term unemployment has found.
 
The proportion of jobless suffering long-term unemployment (defined as those out of 
work a year or more), at 9.7 per cent last year, is down sharply from the peak of 17.3 
per cent during the early 1990s recession, Statistics Canada said in the study released 
yesterday.
 
But long-term unemployment remains at nearly 40 per cent more than in 1990 and 120 
per cent higher than in the late 1970s, it says. And the proportion of long-term 
unemployed older workers, aged 45 and over, was still 17 per cent last year. Among 
the Group of Seven major industrial countries, long-term unemployment is higher in 
Canada than in the U.S., Britain and Japan but lower than in Italy, Germany and France.
 
The report says the number might understate the actual level of long-term unemployment 
among older workers because, after a year or more of being out of work, some may give up 
looking for jobs and drop out of the labour force
 

© The Ottawa Citizen 2004

 
COMMENTS.
 
The last paragraph (bold), in terms of analysis, is extremely dangerous and inappropriate because:-
 
1. People who …drop out of the labour force… become classified as Not in the Labour Force by Stats Can and 
others, and are not included in the count of so-called official unemployed. Thus a false pretence is created that they 
are not any more unemployed and so do not need jobs. These people in fact constitute the majority out of the total 
who need jobs. Yet they are never mentioned in the monthly Labour Force Survey from Stats Can. 
The Ottawa s Hidden Workforce report of Fall 1998 found that most of them are simply discouraged workers 
or social assistance recipients who are employable but getting financial assistance towards food and housing from 
provincial governments.
 
2. The reasons why some people just give up, or the meaning of it, are not explored and the characteristics of the 
phenomenon ...drop out of the labour force... are not explained.
 
3. The statement that some people who had jobs ...may give up looking for work... is vague and not supported 
by any in-depth research. 
 
4. It creates the un-justified impression that the people referred to are just drop-outs or lazy or …have the wrong 
attitude, or some such. 
 
5. I have NEVER seen so much as ONE person raise questions about this type of statement publicly. Therefore I 
must assume that this is how people in Canada – particularly business leaders and hiring managers - think about 
people out of work, in the absence of any proof to the contrary.
 
6. It ignores the people referred to as prospective contributors to the tax base. They can do that if and only if they 
have jobs.
 
7. In general, it is un-professional, pejorative and OFFENSIVE.
 
8. Finally, humans require satisfactory incentives in order to function properly and contribute to the tax base. That 
applies to people out of work as well as everybody else. The Capitalist economic system is – supposedly – an 
incentives-based system. 
 
They do not need the nonsense created by this type of bad and un-professional analysis, from a government body 
that should know better.