Voyageur 83
Carney Drops the Fuel Tax. Your Summer Flight Home Just Got a Little Cheaper.
News for residents of the “11th province”: Canadians abroad.
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Carney Drops the Fuel Tax. Your Summer Flight Home Might Be a Little Cheaper.
Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Tuesday that the federal excise tax on gas, diesel, and aviation fuel is gone until Labour Day - that's good for a dime off the price of every litre of gasoline and four cents off diesel, starting April 20.
The drop follows a rough few months for fuel prices. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively shut since the US-Israel conflict with Iran started in February, the national average hit $1.76 a litre - up from $1.26 before things kicked off. Food suppliers have started tacking on fuel surcharges, and the cost of getting anywhere has been on the rise.
Carney says it’s a bridge measure, not a long-term fix (presumably he knows enough economics to understand the need for demand destruction). The excise suspension will cost the federal treasury roughly $2.4 billion and disappears after September 7. Most readers of the Voyageur will be more interested in the aviation fuel cut. Ticket prices aren’t going to drop overnight, but lower fuel costs for carriers tend to flow through, and it sends a signal that Ottawa is paying attention to the fact that getting to and from Canada is already expensive without a war-driven oil shock on top of it.
Read more: CBC News / CBC News - Food Surcharges
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Young Canadians Are Losing the Job Market. Half of All Q1 Losses Were Under 25.
Canada's youngest workers are taking a beating. Youth unemployment rose to 13.8% in March - more than double the overall rate of 6.7% - and in the first three months of this year, young Canadians took more than half of all job losses despite being just 14% of the workforce.
At a Calgary job fair that saw more than 5,000 attendees, recent grad Jay-Owen Angeles told CBC he had applied to more than 100 companies without getting even a single interview. His brother, a second-year university student, had the same story. The numbers from Statistics Canada confirm the pattern hasn't improved in a year.
For expats who left partly because Canadian career prospects felt stagnant, this might be a familiar tale. For those with kids or younger siblings still in Canada, it's a conversation that’s coming up ever-more often. The Conversation Canada published research this week arguing the problem runs deeper than a skills gap because the whole entry-level employment pipeline that used to convert education into stable work has collapsed. Forty percent of Canadian graduates are now underemployed.
Read more: CBC News / The Conversation Canada