Canadian Personal Finance Blog

To end the week, Stats Canada tells us that Commercial software prices have remained the same from last month, which for a geek like me is good (although continued dropping prices is good too).

The story for employment is about the same from last month as well. Employment growth in Canada is better than in the states for the first four months of this year. The employed number remained the same, and the historically low unemployment numbers have remained the same as well (6.1% seasonally adjusted).

Unemployment in Quebec dropped the most, which is better to hear.

A very interesting point made in the report is:

Overall employment growth for core-aged adults 25 to 54 pales in comparison to older workers 55 and over. While labour force participation among older workers is generally lower than that of core-age workers, employment grew 7.9% over the past 12 months for this group, versus 1.2% for core-aged workers. From a year ago, employment gains for women 55 years and older were higher than for men, 9.7% versus 6.5%.

Workers over 55? Pardon, isn’t that when we are supposed to be dreaming of retirement and our golden years together? That also might say that folks are realizing they can’t afford to retire? Maybe they want the “fraternity” of the workplace as well? All interesting questions to be asked, that someone will no doubt be doing a study on very soon.

Given my situation, I have no aspersions of thinking about “retirement” per say, at an earlier age, as it is not really in the cards for me. Will I be doing the job I am currently doing at that time? Not likely, but I will be doing something, which hopefully I enjoy doing, and that is all I am hoping for, is to be doing what I want, when I want for a descent wage. –C8j

Just in case you didn’t read my previous post about our trade internationally, Stats Canada reconfirmed this with a post about Canadian International Merchandise Trade.

Canadian companies exported $40.6 billion worth of merchandise in March, up 1.4% from February. Automotive products led the growth of exports, increasing a robust 7.9% to $7.4 billion.

Imports were up 3.3% in March, reaching a record high of $35.9 billion. The advance in imports of energy products led the gain. All but two sectors, namely forestry products, and agricultural and fishing products, registered increases as well.

There you have it, good healthy trade for Canada, which is a very good thing, for our economy.

Another interesting point made is that China’s influence on Canada, in terms of Imports, where Canadian imports increase by 18% from China. It seems we export raw materials to China and they return us with finished goods.

What happens when China decides it doesn’t want to export any more, and it creates it ’s own voracious consumer population?