By Nathan Reiter | Lethbridge Herald
Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi didn’t pull any punches during a news conference addressing unemployment Friday afternoon.
A new labour force statistics report by the government of Alberta shows the province has the second highest unemployment rate in Canada at 8.4 per cent, only behind Newfoundland and Labrador.
The unemployment rate has increased 0.6 per cent from July to August and a year-to-date change of 1.7 per cent. The Lethbridge-Medicine Hat region reported an unemployment rate of 7.3 per cent for the month of August.
Nenshi, speaking in Calgary, said there was no positive spin to any of the numbers in the report.
“These are really terrible numbers, sometimes we can find little bits around (like) there’s been some private sector job growth or so on. These numbers are terrible. We’ve had massive job loss in Alberta, we’re driving unemployment across the whole country. There’s nothing good you can say about this.”
The monthly employment growth data saw health care and social assistance with the biggest gains in August with a total of 17,700. Manufacturing was the biggest loss in jobs in August with 25,100 lost jobs.
“The Conservatives here in Alberta like to cosplay as workers,” said Nenshi. “They like to pretend that they’ve got workers in mind, but their economic record doesn’t show that at all. In particular, their economic record of helping young men is dismal. Young men in this province have the highest unemployment rate they’ve ever had, and I’ve seen nothing from this government that shows that they actually take that seriously. Of course we need more people in the skilled trades, and we’ve got to do the work to make those pathways easier. We have to work with workers and their unions to ensure that people can make good lives in those trades.”
The Temporary Foreign Worker (TWF) program has been a topic of discussion recently. Politicians from both sides of the aisle have brought into question the program in the past week. Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has called for the end of the program while B.C. Premier David Eby, who is the leader of the B.C. NDP, has said the program needs to be reformed or thrown out.
Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan has also called for the removal of the program.
Nenshi said the TFW program needs to be re-evaluated, but has certain uses in Alberta.
“We certainly need to review this program and look at its goals. It’s not meant to create a permanent class of exploited workers who come here and don’t have labor protections and are not able to move forward in their lives in a meaningful way. I think that it has gotten out of control since 2021 in terms of the numbers that we’re seeing. There’s also a relationship between the low-wage technical foreign worker program and youth unemployment. Our agricultural sector in Canada wouldn’t work without seasonal temporary foreign workers. It just doesn’t work.
“Let’s ensure that we’re actually talking about real facts and real people.”
