The number of British Columbians receiving Employment Insurance benefits is rising so fast because times had previously been so good, finance minister Colin Hansen said today.
“I think if you look back over the last ten years you'll see successive years where the numbers on EI in British Columbia dropped very dramatically,” said Hansen. “We're coming off a low level compared to historically and yeah, we're going through challenging economic times.”
Statistics Canada announced today that the number of people receiving federal unemployment benefits grew by 7.1 percent countrywide from August to September, and by 12.8 percent in B.C.. The spike in B.C. took the number receiving benefits to more than double a year earlier and was the largest growth in any province besides Alberta.
B.C. had record low unemployment two years ago, said Hansen. “That we're seeing more come onto EI is not surprising, but we have a long ways to go before we hit the kind of levels we've been at in years gone by.”
New Democratic Party finance critic Bruce Ralston said the growth in the number of people receiving EI benefits is a sign the provincial economy remains unstable.
It's a bad time to introduce the harmonized sales tax, he said. The tax will combine the PST and GST in one 12 percent tax starting in July, 2010. Asked Ralston, “Why introduce a bad tax given the continued downturn in the economy?”
Andrew MacLeod is The Tyee’s Legislative Bureau Chief in Victoria. Reach him here.
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Frank
2 years ago
Of course
Of course its unsurprising, look who's in charge.
They created less jobs since taking office 9 years ago than the NDP created in the 1990s and the comparison is getting even worse with every passing month.
Barryeng
2 years ago
Hansen's Credibility
Hansen's credibility has been in the tank for a long time, but he has just blown the last little shred of it. The economy in downtown Vancouver, or Victoria might have been in reasonable shape for most of the last few years, but not recently.
As for most of the areas outside of our 2 major cities, their economies have been in worse shape than Hansen's credility for a long, long time. Even though Hansen refuses to admit it, the resource economy in British Columbia as a whole has been in serious shape for at least five years, The forest sector, even longer. Mining was fine for a while, but even that peaked a long time ago has been tubing since.
For ten years now, the unemployment rate in Northwest BC has been almost twice the provincial average and now the Caribou region is catching up. The East Kootenays are also in bad shape and have been for a long time. The only reason the numbers are not worse, is that a lot of people have fallen off the lists, because they ran out of benefits and are no longer counted. If you add in the number of former resource sector workers now earning Wallmart wages the problems look even worse.
For Colin Hansen to say that things look bad now because they were so good before is not only wrong, is is insulting.