Saturday, August 16, 2014

StatsCan Labour Market Correction

Apparently it was "human error" that had them count working Canadians as outside the labour force.

First: As the Globe & Mail link states, the revised job numbers are still nothing to crow about.

Second: Jim Stanford says much the same thing at The Progressive Economists' Forum.

Third: This embarrassment might have been a calculated plan on the part of the beleaguered institution. Angry at budget cuts and staff cuts and harper's stupid messing with the long-form Census. Even if it makes StatsCan look bad, for a while at least, it opened the government to major criticism and embarrassment.

Fourth: If (as is more likely) this is the result of budget cuts and overworked researchers it is even more dreadful. Thanks to the cretinous dogmatism of the harpercons, our national statistical agency, which helps the government, academics, journalists and ordinary citizens to understand how their economy is doing, how to evaluate the results of public policies, is now a source of doubt.

Perhaps, as embarrassing as it is to the government that brought us to this sorry state, the "benefits" of being able to base your economic health on manipulation of data from Kijiji, when nobody has counter-information to argue otherwise, outweigh the damage done to national credibility.

It's a helluva way to govern though, isn't it?

But they're serial liars. Lies are their life's blood. Facts are the enemy to them.

EDITED TO ADD:

I haven't seen their work. But given Stanford and the Globe & Mail's and everyone else's complete lack of suspicion, I assume that StatsCanada did make the error. Of course, given stephen harper and his corrupt Conservatives, it's entirely possible that there was no error at all, and StatsCan was just strong-armed into changing the numbers. Nothing is beyond the harperscum.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

We have known for quite some years of, Harper's underhanded politics and his underhanded tactics.

Herr Harper has no, honor, decency, ethics nor morals, what-so-ever. Harper's politics are very similar to Hitlers early political days. Hitler too, lied, deceived, thieved, was corrupt, used dirty tactics, dirty politics and, he certainly cheated to win.

Stalin and Mussolini were also paranoid dictators, with many similar characteristics to Hitlers.

greg said...

I can imagine a phone conversation coming out ten years from now.

Harper: "I'd like a better number. ..... Is there anything you can do to get that number up a bit"

Other end: "We've checked it a number of times. We are a little surprised ourselves to be quite honest"

Harper: ".....I'd still like to see some improvement."

Other end: "I'll see what I can do."

Harper: "Thanks very much. Greatly appreciated."

thwap said...

Again, that was my first inclination. But from news reports, and Stanford's post, it appears they've shown their work and where the mistake was.

Either way it is definitely not a good thing for the confidence we can have in such an important institution.