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Decisions about who came to Australia would be increasingly left to employers although, conversely, Australia would also be competing for the most highly skilled migrants. Senator Evans said ”In Australia we’ve got this sense of, ‘Well, we’re the lucky country’ and … people will naturally come here, and that’s still true to an extent. But other countries … are increasingly marketing themselves too.”

Permanent migration is now dominated by the skill stream, 70 per cent, compared to the family-reunion stream.

”We haven’t planned out our cities very well because we have underestimated growth,”

Alberta 4,698

Manitoba 13,089

British Columbia 6,085

The other challenge for policy makers is predicting labour market demand – just because hiring is strong in a field now doesn’t mean it will stay that way in two or three years time

retraining can backfire when there’s no demand at the end of it

best bang for the buck would be in investing in the basics – literacy, English-as-a-second-language training and helping people complete high school.

As the economy slowly recovers from the recession, we need to do what is necessary to achieve a solid recovery in the short term and to begin repairing our provincial fiscal situation. But our long-term challenge remains – raising our productivity, which is synonymous with improving our innovation capabilities and performance. Robust innovation results can be achieved through more key business investments and by the right government policies and strategies for innovation. The Report concludes that businesses need to step up their investments in technology – from R&D to patents to adapting existing technology to their businesses. Equally important is the ongoing need to develop stronger management capabilities in our businesses. The Task Force also recommends that governments improve their innovation polices by shifting their efforts from new-to-the-world inventions to relevant-to-the market innovations. These are the key conclusions of the Ninth Annual Report, Today’s innovation, tomorrow’s prosperity, released today by the Task Force on Competitiveness, Productivity and Economic Progress.

The report highlights 7 challenges facing city planners: energy and climate change, river water supply, food security, biodiversity, air quality, one planet living, and waste management.

Edmonton is currently losing protected spaces to generating new ones at a rate of 5:2, and it recommends that we implement city-wide biodiversity planning which uses techniques such as biodiversity offset (where new protected spaces are generated for previous spaces claimed)

Noting that the White Paper report has a 30-year timeline, its largest weakness is that it provides no financial analysis citing that all of these projects would be economically beneficial if studied in sufficiently long timeframes. While the irreplaceable value of our natural surroundings is widely appreciated, a 5-year or 10-year estimate of how this plan will affect the city’s bottom line would be a necessity before the valuable suggestions the White Paper has made are incorporated into city planning policies

it's the sector in which the government has most directly intervened -- health care -- that has maintained the most robust job growth over the past two years, adding 20,000 new jobs in November alone.

it is harder to avoid the notion that a lot of those old jobs simply weren't adding much to the economy

The story runs as follows. Before the financial crash, there were lots of not-so-useful workers holding not-so-useful jobs. Employers didn't so much bother to figure out who they were. Demand was high and revenue was booming, so rooting out the less productive workers would have involved a lot of time and trouble -- plus it would have involved some morale costs with the more productive workers, who don't like being measured and spied on. So firms simply let the problem lie.

But there's good reason to believe that the labor market won't be keeping pace. Rather than an aberration, high unemployment may be an enduring feature of the United States' economy.

Even if the December rate of job creation continues, it will be 2014 before unemployment is down to 5 percent.

ConsiderCanada.com and CanadaEnTete.com, two new Web sites that provide comprehensive information for global companies considering expansion into North America.

According to the World Economic Forum, Canada has benefited from the soundest banking system in the world for the last three years running. For the eighth consecutive time, KPMG's Competitive Alternatives study finds Canada leading the G7 with the lowest business costs. The C.D. Howe Institute, which studies social and economic policy, also stated that Canada's international reputation as a destination for capital and investment is better than it has been for a generation

Economic development professionals from Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Québec City, Winnipeg, the Waterloo Region, and Saskatoon work together every day to guide international companies to the Canadian city or cities that offer the most strategic fit," says Michael Darch, Executive Director of OCRI's Ottawa Global Marketing team. "ConsiderCanada.com and CanadaEnTete.com are the latest tools at our disposal to bring new opportunities home.

For decades now, at least one-third of the city's 12,000 employees, mainly office workers and professionals, have had a deal where they can work a bit of extra time each day, then take off every second Friday as a holiday.

The argument is that you have to do something like this to make the job attractive or else you won't be able to keep staff. But I can't think of anybody I know outside of government that gets every second Friday off. Can you?

've always thought it's not necessary to retain staff by giving them every second Friday off. ... I'm not buying the logic of the policy."

Technology is eating jobs—and not just obvious ones like toll takers and phone operators. Lawyers and doctors are at risk as well.

Forget blue-collar and white- collar. There are two types of workers in our economy: creators and servers. Creators are the ones driving productivity—writing code, designing chips, creating drugs, running search engines. Servers, on the other hand, service these creators (and other servers) by building homes, providing food, offering legal advice, and working at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Many servers will be replaced by machines, by computers and by changes in how business operates. It's no coincidence that Google announced it plans to hire 6,000 workers in 2011.

What if, however, you were told most of your mortgage or all of your rent could be paid off instantly, or you could send your kids to a national daycare program? Still bored? Yet that’s exactly what could have happened if Canada didn’t have a productivity gap with the U.S., according to Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Canada trails the U.S. in GDP per capita by $9,300. In 1981 that gap was only $2,600. If we got back to the 1981 gap, the average family would see their disposable, after-tax income go up by $8,800, according to the institute, which is the research arm for the task force chaired by Martin.

That would be like having almost all the mortgages and rental payments disappear. It would be like having enough money to pay for a national child-care program and still have enough left over for the biggest tax cut in history

Yet it's worth thinking about why it's absurd to argue that every state should try to subsidise up a local film industry but not crazy to support local universities. Certainly, there are huge efficiencies being sacrificed by duplicating administrative capacity all around the country. And academics benefit from close proximity to those working on similar problems; the efficacy of research is reduced when it's spread more thinly around the country. If America had fewer, bigger states, it would probably have fewer, bigger universities, and that might well be a very good thing.

The joke, I'm sure I don't need to explain, is that not every state can succeed by poaching productions from other states, since what's made in one state can't be made in another. But that's not quite right. A subsidy allows a business to cut prices and artificially raise demand. Given generous enough subsidies, many more movies would be made, and each state could, potentially, have a thriving film industry. This is how higher education works, more or less. New Mexico has state universities just like California and Iowa and Alaska. These schools are understandably viewed as foundations of the local economies in which they're located, as well as important cultural institutions. And we obviously view the subsidisation of the production of college graduates as a worthwhile contribution to long-run growth, again, understandably.

[Former New Mexico Governor Bill] Richardson says that the film and TV subsidy has brought "nearly $4 billion into our economy over eight years" and has created 10,000 jobs. By "our," he means New Mexico. He says every state should emulate this success.

Skilled jobs will go to the lowest bidder worldwide. A decline in middle class pay and job satisfaction is only just beginning

Americans are about to suffer a profound shock. For the past 30 years governments have explained that, while they can no longer protect jobs through traditional forms of state intervention such as subsidies and tariffs, they can expand and reform education to maximise opportunity. If enough people buckle down to acquiring higher-level skills and qualifications, Europeans and Americans will continue to enjoy rising living standards. If they work hard enough, each generation can still do better than its parents. All that is required is to bring schools up to scratch and persuade universities to teach "marketable" skills. That is the thinking behind Michael Gove's policies and those of all his recent predecessors as education secretary.

"Knowledge work", supposedly the west's salvation, is now being exported like manual work. A global mass market in unskilled labour is being quickly succeeded by a market in middle-class work, particularly for industries, such as electronics, in which so much hope of employment opportunities and high wages was invested. As supply increases, employers inevitably go to the cheapest source. A chip designer in India costs 10 times less than a US one.

The US economy did not have a conspicuous unemployment problem until the crisis of 2008 because the non-tradable sector absorbed the bulk of the expanding labor force. That pace of employment growth now appears unsustainable. Government and health care alone accounted for almost 40% of the net increment in employment in the entire economy from 1990 to 2008. Fiscal weakness, a resetting of real-estate values, and lower consumption all point to the potential for long-term structural unemployment.

Restoring elements of manufacturing competitiveness is hard. Once skilled labor, training programs, and technical institutions in specific industries are gone, it is difficult to get them back. Long-term policy should include an evolving assessment of competitive strength and employment potential across sectors and at all levels of human capital, with the goal of encouraging market outcomes that achieve social objectives.

Productivity in Canada’s cities lags city regions globally

The Institute reports that Canada’s GDP per capita – a measure of the value created by workers and firms in Canada from the human, physical, and natural resources in the country – trailed the US by $9,500 or 17 percent in 2010

Canada’s lower productivity as the key challenge in closing this prosperity gap. “Canadians are among the leaders in developed economies in work effort, hours worked per person, but we are laggards in creating economic value per hour worked

The first American job machine was organized around farms and agricultural employment. More than four in 10 Americans worked on farms in 1800. Another 20 percent or so worked in manufacturing.

The second great American job machine took hold during the mid-19th century, propelled by the surge in manufacturing.  By late in the century, some 60 percent of the workforce had been absorbed in industrial jobs while agricultural work dropped to roughly ten percent of employment. Industrial and blue-collar manufacturing jobs would power America's economic and employment growth for the better part of the next century, until roughly1950. But for most of those years, it was low-wage, long-day, dirty and dangerous work -- it wasn't until the Great Depression, the New Deal, and post WW II prosperity that blue-collar jobs became good, family supporting jobs.

Against the backdrop of a massive decline in once high-paying blue collar manufacturing jobs which is eerily similar to the decline of agricultural jobs a century or so ago, this third transformation is creating not one overall, but two distinct categories of jobs and employment.