Edward J. Chambers

Revisiting Portraits of Small Business Growth and Employment in Western Canada

The report examines the importance of small business to the economies and employment of Canada’s four western provinces, and is an update of an earlier report, released in 1999.

Changing trends in the Alberta labour force

This Bulletin analyses the labour force participation rate (LFPR) in Alberta in aggregate terms, by gender, and by age group through a separation of the effects of longer trends from shorter term influences. The labour force participation rate is simply the percent of the population in the labour force who are working or actively seeking work. The LFPR may be an overall or aggregate rate that is the proportion of the population 15 years of age and older that is in the labour force, or it may be expressed for gender or age sub-groups. Data for the LFPR comes from the Statistics Canada monthly Labour Force Survey of households. Across Canada LFPRs are far from uniform. Nationally, in 2007, the annual average was 67.6%. However, at the low end was Newfoundland and Labrador with a rate of 59.2%, while our neighbouring province of British Columbia recorded a rate of 66.3%. At a 2007 rate of 74.1%, Alberta was substantially above the national average and, indeed, had the highest rate in Canada—and one of the highest in the western world. Given the rather unique situation in Alberta, it is useful to examine in more detail the path of the LFPR over past decades and to consider the patterns of change in the demographic groups that make up the labour force.

Some realities of dispute resolution procedures under the FTA and their application to NAFTA

The Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Canada (ETA), which came into effect at the beginning of 1989, was in many ways a defensive response to the new trading realities of the 1980s. These realities, at least as perceived by Canadians and acknowledged by astute American observers, arose from a modification, if not a redirection, in the focus of U.S. international trade policy. That modification was in part a reaction to the changed economic position of the United States in the international community, one in which American power was no longer dominant but rather placed first in a triad that included Japan and a European Community which was represented in its most observable trade competitiveness by Germany. This realignment of world economic power was accompanied by shifts in American trade policy-some subtle and some not so subtle. For more than three decades after World War II, America was the undisputed leader in pursuing freer multilateral trading relationships. But American trade policy changed course during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since that time the United States has pursued a four-track approach that at times has been consistent with its postwar trade heritage and at other times has appeared, at least to objective observers, as signaling quite significant shifts in policy orientation. One of the tracks, consistent with its post-World War II heritage, is American pursuit of a successful completion of GATT multilateral negotiations in the Uruguay Round. I hasten to add, however, that its negotiating decision to concentrate on the agricultural subsidy question, at times almost to the exclusion of everything else, arguably has had a high opportunity cost in at best delaying and at worst nullifying the prospect of agreements over services, anti-dumping and subsidy codes, and other matters. A second track in American policy has been simply increased administered protection through the aggressive use, in particular, of countervailing duty and anti-dumping laws. The number of countervail and anti-dumping cases pursued by American authorities increased by orders of magnitude in the post-1980 years. In the past decade, for example, it has been estimated that the United States accounted for approximately two-fifths of the number of both anti-dumping cases and definitive duties applied, and three-fifths of the countervailing duty actions, as well as nine-tenths of the duties applied under them (McKinney 1991).

Nouveau portrait des petites entreprises de l'Ouest du Canada: croissance et emploi

Le rapport examine l’effet des petites entreprises sur l’economie et sur l’emploi dans les quatre provinces de l’Ouest canadien. De plus, il constitue une mise a jour d’un precedent rapport publie en 1999.

NAFTA and the economic impact on Western Canada

This paper is about economic transitions in the four western Canadian provinces since the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) came into effect. It begins with a brief introductory comment on western Canadas international links. The second section provides an overview of changes that have occurred in the economies of the four western provinces during the period of the FTA using 1988 as a benchmark for evaluating these transitions. This section relies heavily on estimates of industry real gross domestic product at factor cost, employment, and average hourly earnings. The emphasis is on the goods producing sector with special reference to the developments that have taken place in the production and marketing of manufactures. The service sector is considered only in a limited manner by reference to business services. The final section of the paper uses monthly labour force survey data to compare employment variability for three of the western provinces before and after the FTA.