Canada and the World Backgrounder articles from March 1995

Canada and the World Backgrounder archives from March 1995

Who's in charge here?(heavy dependence on foreign investments affects Canadian economic policy)(Editorial)
March 1, 1995... Once a year, the Finance Minister stands in the House of Commons and presents a budget. This is a review of the health of the nation's economy. It is a balance sheet of government income and expenses. In year's gone by, budgets were used to set...

It's a small world.(earthquake in Kobe, Japan, affects interest rates in Canada)
March 1, 1995... An earthquake devastated Kobe, Japan in January 1995, and Wilma and Georges Fleury felt the tremors in their living room on Chicoutimi. Reconstruction of the Japanese city will cost an estimated $130 billion. Japan had been investing its huge...

Decline of the blue-collar worker.(New Economy - De-Industrialization)
March 1, 1995... Before World War I, farmers composed the largest single group of workers in every country. This statement would have been true at any time since the dawn of history. It applied equally in Germany and German East Africa, Canada and Cambodia....

Bad news - good news. (disadvantages and advantages of corporate downsizing)(New Economy - De-Industrialization)
March 1, 1995... There has been some criticism that large companies have been behaving like barracudas in a pond full of guppies. The massive downsizing of the last five years has proven how heartless large corporations really are, said the critics. Big business...

Lack of vision. (value of many technological innovations was not readily apparent)(New Economy - De-Industrialization)
March 1, 1995... Innovation drives economic growth. This is something that's so well known that it's amazing how often the captains of industry fail to recognize the potential of new ideas. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, many "experts"...

Turnaround. (U.S. car companies reduce costs and improve market share)(New Economy - De-Industrialization)
March 1, 1995... In the 1970s, U.S. car manufacturers were being clobbered by imports. The Japanese, in particular, were building better vehicles at lower cost than their American counterparts. The war for customers pushed Chrysler to the brink of bankruptcy,...

World without borders: business now operates beyond the confines and often the control of individual nations.(New Economy - Globalization)
March 1, 1995... Knowledge has become the key resource for a nation's economic strength. Knowledge knows no boundaries. There is no domestic knowledge and no international knowledge. There is only knowledge. It is portable. It can be created everywhere, fast and...

Spin-offs from the political revolution. (collapse of communism impacts world economies)(New Economy - Globalization)
March 1, 1995... The collapse of Communism is having an enormous impact on the economies of the world. One result is that a large pool of low-wage, although not necessarily unskilled, labour has been released into the marketplace. Manufacturers can now tap into...

The comeback city.(New Economy - Hamilton, Ontario)
March 1, 1995... Rarely do cities come back from the dead. However, Hamilton, Ontario has been able to turn the trick. After the near meltdown of the local steel giants Stelco and Dofasco, the city has bounced back to life. Through early retirement, attrition,...

Steeltown. (history of steel industry in Hamilton, Ontario)(New Economy - Hamilton, Ontario)
March 1, 1995... Steel helped give Hamilton much of its identity. As the major building material of the 19th and 20th centuries, steel was essential to producing all modern inventions -- railroads, oceangoing liners and battleships, cars, trucks, girders for...

Jobless crisis. (Canada)(New Economy - Unemployment)
March 1, 1995... In the not-so-distant past, massive unemployment was a problem limited to the Third World. That pattern began changing in the 1980s as global competition, huge trading blocs, and robots replacing humans began to affect jobs in developed countries...

The jobless recovery. (unemployment rate in Canada falls to 10% in 1992)(New Economy - Unemployment)
March 1, 1995... The recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s knocked the stuffing out of Canadian industry. The low point for workers was the period from April 1990 to April 1992, when 480,000 jobs disappeared. The official jobless rate went up to 11.1%. The...

The lost generation. (increase in unemployment and poverty for Canadian young adults)(New Economy - Unemployment)
March 1, 1995... Hunting for a job in vain is devastating to morale and self-esteem for all age groups. However, a major concern is the so-called "lost generation" among Canadian youth, aged 15 to 24. A study in 1994 by Statistics Canada showed that a record...

Matching skills to needs.(New Economy - The Job Market)
March 1, 1995... Even with more than 1.5 million Canadians out of work, Bank of Nova Scotia Chairman Cedric Ritchie said, in 1994, that uneployment is not our basic problem. It's the growing gap between those who have the skills to adapt to the new work place and...

Virtual shopping. (how consumers will use television to shop for groceries in the future)(New Economy - The Job Market)
March 1, 1995... Frank Ogden writes in The Last Book You'll Ever Read: "An advanced type of glove allows supermarket shopping without leaving your chair. You turn on your TV set, see the grocery store interior, put on your glove, and as you "stroll" through the...

Corporate dieting: fewer and fewer people are being forced to do more and more work.(New Economy - White Collar Workers)
March 1, 1995... Blue-collar workers are laid-off. White-collar workers are "de-layered." This a polite way of saying the same thing. Survival in the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism has forced hundreds of industries to remove entire layers of management. Those...

Technology gulch. (industries that employ the most and least knowledge workers)(New Economy - White Collar Workers)
March 1, 1995... The winners in tomorrow's corporate world will be the companies and industries with the strongest knowledge base. This is the widely held belief among the experts, one of whom is Nuala Beck. She says you can figure out how smart a company is by...

Flexible workstyles.(New Economy - The Workplace)
March 1, 1995... In the future workplace, fewer workers will have full-time, permanent jobs. Part-time and contract work are increasing everywhere as firms demand flexibility and seek to dodge hefty non-wage costs and employment-protection laws. And employees who...

Job creators. (most new jobs are in small companies)(New Economy - The Workplace)
March 1, 1995... Small companies are the biggest job creators, according to Statistics Canada. Between 1978 and 1992, they destroyed more jobs than big companies too but new employment more than offset job losses. All told, companies with fewer than 50 employees...

Let's share. (job-sharing)(New Economy - The Workplace)
March 1, 1995... Job-sharing usually means two people splitting one full-time job, generally by working two-and-a-half days each a week. They split the pay and benefits of a full-time worker. The arrangement tends to work best in highly structured jobs such as...

The business of volunteering. (volunteer jobs become hard to find)(New Economy - The Workplace)
March 1, 1995... Some people who find themselves out of a paid job are looking at volunteer work as a form of employment. Something to at least beef up the resume, and perhaps maintain sanity. But competition is becoming so fierce that one university graduate...

Is telecommuting for you?(New Economy - The Workplace)
March 1, 1995... One B.C. consultant suggests that people who want to telecommute need to be disciplined, well-organized self-starters, highly motivated by their work. Their managers also have to be able to establish clear objectives, trust their employees, and...

Self-employed or exploited?(New Economy - The Workplace)
March 1, 1995... A lot of people are going into business for themselves and thriving. Many are talented workers with highly mobile skills that are in demand. But, not all homeworkers are doing it by choice. Some experts are concerned that homeworkers could...

Building the access ramps.(New Economy - Information Highway)
March 1, 1995... Just what is the information highway? The idea behind the concept is to combine the best features of existing technology in new ways. Telephone lines go into almost every home and business. But, existing lines don't have the capacity to carry...

Road kill on the Info Highway. (Encyclopedia Britannica loses profitability after failing to adopt new technology)(New Economy - Information Highway)
March 1, 1995... For 200 years, the encyclopedia business was dominated by one company -- Encyclopedia Britannica. Millions of households around the world made the $2,000 investment in a set. Then along came Encarta, Grolier, and others. Instead of buying books...

Farewell to big government.(New Economy - Social Change)
March 1, 1995... Before the welfare state, social tasks were performed by communities and neighbours. Perhaps, the classic example is the barn raising. Building a barn was an enormous task for one family to take on. But, with the whole community pitching in the...

The social sector. (nonprofit sector assumes responsibility for social welfare)(New Economy - Social Change)
March 1, 1995... With the decline of the community taking responsibility for the welfare of its members, it seemed likely the company would take over the role. To some extent, this was true in Japan where you had lifetime employment, company housing, company...

Government online. (Canadian government programs streamline services)(New Economy - Social Change)
March 1, 1995... In 1994, Ottawa released a discussion paper: Blueprint for Renewing Government Services Using Information Technology. The paper says taxpayers are demanding -- rightly -- to know: "Why do I have to call so many places? Why do I have to wait so...

Another view. (Linda McQuaig maintains Canada's debt crisis is a corporate move to cut social programs)(New Economy - Social Change)
March 1, 1995... There are those, and journalist Linda McQuaig is one of them, who believe that cutting social services is all part of a plot cooked up by the business-dominated political right. In her book Shoot the Hippo, Ms. McQuaig argues that the debt crisis...

"Smedley! You're outplaced!" (new terminology for being fired)(New Economy - Social Change)
March 1, 1995... Whenever we humans come up against something unpleasant we try to make it easier to cope with by giving it a softer-sounding description. So, hardly anybody gets fired anymore -- they are de-hired, outplaced, re-structured, downsized, but never...

Are we right, or are we right? (ethical aspects of using low-paid labor in developing countries)(New Economy - Moral Issues)
March 1, 1995... In April 1994, 50,000 Indonesian factory workers in the city of Medan took to the streets in protest. They wanted to double their wages of $2.50 a day. And, they wanted the freedom to form independent unions. They were up in arms against the...

The dark side of the Net. (hate literature on the Internet)(New Economy - Moral Issues)
March 1, 1995... Cyberspace, with its boundless electronic information network, can astonish and delight us. According to a special Spring 1995 issue of Time Magazine, there are 30 million to 40 million people in more than 160 countries with at least E-mail...

The changing Canadian economy.(About Canada)
March 1, 1995... Every Canadian, from the newborn infant to the oldest senior, is in some way affected by computer technology. A mere 15 years ago, this technology was largely restricted to universities, the military, and the U.S. space program. Now, it is such...

The history of change. (economic change)(About Canada)
March 1, 1995... There have been technological revolutions since the dawn of human history. Consider, for example, the effects of stone tools and weapons on early hunting societies. But over the past 200 years in Western Europe and North America there has been a...

The power of the rail. (how railways changed Canada)(About Canada)
March 1, 1995... The combination of high-quality steel and the steam engine produced another major technological innovation: the railway. By dramatically reducing transportation costs, the railway encouraged economic development in almost all areas of the...

Enter the automobile. (how the automobile changed Canada)(About Canada)
March 1, 1995... Two other technologies, the harnessing of electric power and the invention of the internal combustion engine, were almost as revolutionary as the steam engine. The internal combustion engine first made its appearance at the Paris Exposition of...

The promise of the microchip. (effects of technological change)(About Canada)
March 1, 1995... The promise of the new technology is easy to identify. In the workplace, firms are using digital technology to re-engineer production processes using robotics and CADICAM (Computer Assisted Design/Computer Assisted Manufacturing). Improvements in...

The pitfalls. (problems caused by technological change)(About Canada)
March 1, 1995... The digital/microchip revolution holds pitfalls as well as promises. Pessimists worry that the technological changes will polarize society into "haves" with good incomes and rewarding jobs, and "have-nots", with little hope of secure or...

Adaptation is the key. (adapting to technological change)(About Canada)
March 1, 1995... When viewed in long-term perspective, we must conclude that past technological changes generated real gains for Canadians, as workers and as consumers, and none created a permanent state of high unemployment. We may reasonably hope then that...