Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for September 10th, 2007

I always find Vacations very confusing in terms of never getting completely relaxed and then returning to a fire storm of activity at work, but vacations are important I think.

I have been ignoring Stats Canada for a while so here are some interesting points from our amigos in the land of statistics:

• Commercial Computers price index dropped again in June by 0.6% from May, which is great to see, and it still astounds me that computers continue to decrease in price, but I think I need to investigate this index more as to how they are doing their comparison. Given Apple’s drop in price of the iPhone, when is the best time to buy a computer or new piece of technology?
• There is a growing business for the government in the area of Tourism? Odd topic, but evidently the income that the government attributes to Tourism (taxes on travelers and paid by tourists) has been increasing from 2000 to 2006, which is interesting.
  

  The study found that tourism accounted for 3.9% of government revenue in 2006. This reflected the relatively high taxes on many goods and services bought by tourists, such as fuel, alcohol, and entertainment in casinos. At the same time, tourism accounted for 3.8% of all jobs in the economy and 2.0% of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP).

  Interesting to know that the government makes direct income from Tourism.

• Unemployment continues to be at historically low levels, which again is a nice thing to see. Construction is the big employment boom these days, but more older folks are getting jobs as well.
  

  In August, almost all of the employment growth for adult men and women came from those aged 55 and over. An estimated 34,000 older workers found employment in August. Since the beginning of this year, employment among the 55 and over age group has increased by 4.6%, the fastest pace of all age groups, with stronger growth for women (+5.5%) than men (+3.9%). The August employment rate for older men was its highest since 1985; the rate for older women was near the all-time high set in April of this year.

  We are working later in life? I think we have talked about that before.

Is the Canadian Economy overheating? Hard to tell, but we are living in previously unseen times, so that might be a hint that things might be too good to be true?