“Among Canadians, the rate of self-employment—that is, the number of self-employed workers as a share of total employment—has been relatively stable, hovering around 15% over the last decade. However, when we focus on the core-age group (those aged 40 and older), interesting patterns emerge: Overall Self-Employment Rate:In 2018, approximately 2.9 million Canadians were self-employed, up … Read more
Five short decades ago, the economic landscape in Canada and the world was vastly different. Five decades before that farming was the dominant occupation, and Canada was primarily rural. In this overview, we’ll look at the accounting occupation in Canada and how it has changed during the last five decades and try and understand some … Read more
Audit and management consulting work are largely irrelevant for the smaller 99% of firms that dominate the sector. Auditing has been declining in importance since the US public markets started shrinking since their heyday in the mid to late 1990s. Today private equity is the most common way for early-stage companies to scale their operations. … Read more
Higher Education Lobbyists Line Up for Handouts In September 2019, Oxford University in the UK published an article by Gwilym Croucher linking productivity and higher education: “Universities and colleges now demand a greater proportion of public and private resources and form a larger part of the economic life of most countries. Higher education contributes to … Read more
Bloatware in Canadian Colleges – YouTube.com Despite their assertions about developing critical thinking skills in graduates or protecting the public interest, our education industry seems to have succumbed to a sales culture and growth at-all-costs model more in keeping with private sector businesses than quasi-public organizations. Canadian demographics have shifted in a big way over … Read more
Are Colleges + Professional Bodies Guilty of Match Fixing? According to a report released by Statistics Canada on November 30 of 2022: “Recent immigrants made up nearly half of the growth in the share of Canadians with a bachelor’s degree or higher. However, some immigrants’ talents remain underutilized, as over one-quarter of all immigrants with … Read more
Canada’s Falling Productivity (and what’s behind it) THE PRODUCTIVITY-EDUCATION LINK The conventional wisdom is that the more highly-educated the workforce, the greater the productivity should be. Most policy analysts and think tanks seem to reach the same conclusion. In September of 2019, Gwilym Croucher[1] wrote in OXFORD BIBLIOGRAPHIES: “Universities and colleges now demand a greater … Read more
