This winter, for the first time in a decade, Sheri Doornekamp (left, with husband Hank) had to lay people off from her Kingston, Ont., construction company.
She was thrilled, then, to be able to call up six of those laid-off employees last week and tell them they were going to back to work — fixing a bridge — thanks to some federal government infrastructure spending.
“When you can get a job in our business in the middle of winter, you are keeping guys employed. Absolutely,” said Doornekamp.
For the federal government, that's six down and 189,994 to go.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, in the 2009 federal budget, said it was Ottawa's intention to “create or maintain close to 190,000 jobs.”
But how does a federal government actually go about creating a job? How does one measure a government's job-creation success or lack of it?
These are not academic questions. In the first place, between November and January alone, more than 234,000 Canadians have lost their jobs and many of those will be looking to the federal government for help. Economic forecasters believe another 250,000 could be out of work before year's end … [Read the rest of the story]
Technorati Tags: economic stimulus, economy, jim flaherty, budget 2009
What an excellent article. And thank you for pointing out that this infrastructure spending is not coming from the 2009 stimulus package budget. All along Harper had been predicting this, just look to his December 2007 year end interviews.
I disagree with this budget because it won't work. It's been proven you can't spend your way out of a recession. But I don't disagree with infrastructure spending, it needs to be done and right now the public can't afford to build, so let the government do it. Short term and as your article points out, creates jobs.
The money for the project in your article was set aside by previous budgets because it takes time to get this money out the door and they planned ahead. Unfortunately we are all so enamoured by what's going on down south, that we almost wish it were the same here. The Americans are in a much worse crisis, but we are expected to follow in lock step with everything they do. They have a huge stimulus package, we should have one too.
Nobody could predict the depth of this economic collapse but at least the current government made planned efforts to try and limit the damages; lower taxes for businesses, lower GST, increased infrastructure spending announced way before the actual crisis took hold. We elected a conservative government with a trained economist in the driver's seat and somehow the opposition has managed to bully us all in to believing that they know better. Bob Rae, of all people, knows this spending spree won't work and yet he voted in favor of it. My spider senses are tingling…