A tale of two economies : Deux économies

A Tale of Two Economies Andrew Jackson, National Director Social and Economic Policy, Canadian Labour Congress While the overall unemployment rate is low and the media paint a reassuring picture of broadly-based prosperity, the reality is that disturbing new divisions of sector and region are being overlaid upon already deepening class differences. [...] A Tale of Two Economies by Andrew Jackson Page 2 Over the course of the 1990s, the share of all taxable wage and salary income going to the top 1% - roughly those making more than $150,000 per year - jumped from 9% to 14% of the total, and the share of the top one tenth of one percent rose even more sharply. [...] While the number of unemployed workers is indeed low and has been falling mainly because of job growth, the majority of the new jobs created in 2005 were in self-employment and in temporary jobs, as opposed to permanent payroll jobs. [...] Among the hardest hit sectors are auto and auto parts, especially the suppliers to the Big 3; clothing and textiles in the wake of changed international trade rules; a pulp and paper sector which must contend with new low cost global suppliers hobbled by a high dollar; and, especially, light manufacturers who relied on the low Canadian dollar to sell into the US market through much of the 1990s. [...] Manufacturing - supported by a low Canadian dollar - played a major role in the economic recovery of the mid to late 1990s, adding jobs to a sector which had been extremely hard-hit in the early 1990s by free-trade driven restructuring and the high interest rate/high dollar policies of the Bank of Canada under John Crow.