In 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, only of 15 to 24 year olds who were laid off, or who quit their jobs for “just cause”, received Employment Insurance benefits. People who leave their jobs to return to school, or who get fed up with spending Saturday night working at Tim Horton’s, are not even included in these calculations. Going back to school is not “just cause” for quitting, so students are automatically disqualified from EI.

To put that 48 per cent number into perspective, 90 per cent of men and women between 25 and 69 who were laid off, or quit for just cause, received EI benefits.

The young are disadvantaged, in part, because many are new labour market entrants. An established worker in a high unemployment region of the country can qualify for EI benefits after as little 420 hours of work. A new entrant has to work 910 hours over a 52 week period to qualify for benefits. Since many young workers work part-time, or only part of the year, they do not qualify.

The new entrant rules reflect what I call the “EI as crack cocaine” hypothesis – or, in more , the idea that “early use of Employment Insurance may induce an individual to become a frequent user”. If using EI at a young age causes individuals to become hooked, the best remedy is to stop young people from ever trying EI, by imposing tougher qualification requirements on them.

As a parent, I don’t want my children to get hooked on EI. At the same time, however, I don’t want them to have to pay into a system that’s stacked against them. Here’s my solution: refund the premiums. Young workers who are denied EI because they have not worked enough hours should be entitled to a refund of the premiums they have paid into the system.

It might be argued that it doesn’t matter; a typical young worker might not pay more than more than $100 or $200 a year into the EI system. But little injustices add up to big injustices. Over years of part-time work, a student can pay hundreds of dollars in EI premiums. Furthermore, EI affects large numbers of people. According to the most recent , there are two-and-a-half million people under 25 working in the Canadian labour market, and this group has the highest unemployment rate of any demographic in Canada.

Collecting premiums from young workers and then denying them benefits is just not fair.

University of Chicago economist Tobias Moskowitz and Sports Illustrated writer Jon Wertheim stirred up some controversy last year by claiming, in their book , that home team advantage is primarily due to officiating bias. “Home teams in hockey,” they argue, “get 20 per cent fewer penalties called on them and receive fewer minutes in the box per penalty.”

According to Moskowitz and Wertheim, referees are not consciously biased. Yet they are human and, “When humans are faced with enormous pressure – say, making a crucial call with a rabid crowd yelling, taunting and chanting a few feet away – it is natural to want to alleviate that pressure. By making snap-judgment calls in favor of the home team, referees, whether they consciously appreciate it or not, are relieving some of that stress.”

The Winnipeg Jets/Atlanta Thrashers offer a unique opportunity to test Moskowitz and Wertheim’s theories. Officials should face more pressure at the MTS Centre, packed full of Jets fans, than they did in the Philips Arena. If the authors are right, Winnipeg’s surprisingly strong home record this season should be due to, in part, to more favourable refereeing.

To put the theory to the test, we compiled home and away penalty statistics for the 2010/11 Atlanta Thrashers and the 2011/12 Winnipeg Jets. We focused on minor penalties only, because Moskowitz and Wertheim argue that the pro-home team bias should be particularly pronounced for less clear-cut calls, such as hooking or holding. Also majors are relatively rare – the Jets had only six this season, Atlanta had nine last year.

In 2010/11, Atlanta received 7 per cent fewer minor penalties than their opponents at home. This is in line with Moskowitz and Wertheim’s predictions, but it is hard to believe that Atlanta’s penalty advantage was due to some sub-conscious response to the taunts of Thrashers’ fans. The advantages any home team enjoys – to match lines, for example – could have caused them to take fewer penalties. Alternatively, the Thrashers’ penalty advantage in home games might have been due to something about their game. Atlanta actually received fewer penalties than their opponents in away games, which is consistent with this idea.

In 2011/12, the Jets had the advantage of noisy fans amplified by the MTS Centre’s distinctive acoustics. Looking only at home penalty numbers, it would appear that fan support made little difference to the officiating: Winnipeg received just 2 per cent fewer minor penalties than their opponents in home games this season. This could be taken as evidence that the referees are immune to crowd pressure – or that the publication of Scorecasting, by making people aware of officiating bias, has helped to reduce or eliminate it.

Yet once Winnipeg’s home record is put into broader perspective, a slightly different pattern appears. Winnipeg had a penalty problem this year. In away games, they received 29 per cent more penalties than their opposition. It is possible that only fan pressure prevented the Jets’ home penalty record from being worse than it was.

The Jets/Thrashers comparison is a “natural experiment”. The 2011/12 Jets and the 2010/11 Thrashers had the same Southeast division opponents, and similar line-ups. The difference between the two teams should be due to something that changed when the Thrashers moved to Winnipeg. Fan support is one possibility. Another one, noted by many commentators, is travel schedules – Winnipeg had long stretches of home games, and the other teams in the Southeast division had to travel more. Certainly there was something other than officiating driving the Jets’ home team performance this year. For example, Winnipeg had a 22 per cent powerplay efficiency at home this year, and third worst on the road, 12.7 per cent. Favourable calls are no use unless a team is able to capitalize on them.

The Jets/Thrashers experiment provides only limited support for Moskowitz and Wertheim’s hypothesis. But there is one thing they get right: “for shootouts – held during clearly important times in the game when you’d expect the crowd to be especially involved and boisterous – the significant home ice advantage normally present in the NHL evaporates.” The Jets’ shootout record was zero for three at home, three wins in four shootouts on the road.

There are two ways of approaching the economics of casinos. One is to start with the basic premise that gambling is just a form of entertainment. There is no fundamental difference between visiting a casino and going to watch a Leafs game – in both cases, the odds of winning are less than one might like.

Yet, if gambling is just another form of entertainment, what is the justification for providing it through an OLG monopoly? Most people accept that competition is the best guarantee of quality goods and service. Why should gambling be any different?

Indeed, if there was more competition in the gambling market, there is the possibility that products would emerge that harnessed people’s propensity to gamble in positive ways. For example, banks in countries around the world offer . Why force people to choose between saving and buying a lottery ticket when people could earn lottery tickets by saving?

A second way of approaching the economics of casinos is to start with the presumption that gambling is a potentially dangerous activity, like drinking and smoking.

Study after study, as summarized , finds that lottery and other gaming revenues come disproportionately from lower income people. Instant games, such as slot machines, are particularly insidious. They prey on those who seek instant gratification, and study after study shows that success in life is strongly related to the ability to defer gratification, to avoid eating the marshmallow.

This same review found no evidence that increased gaming revenues lead to better or improved public services. U.S. studies have found that the introduction of presence of state lotteries ear-marked for education is associated with lower levels of education funding. Correlation is not causation, but the experience south of the border is enough to cast doubt on the argument that higher gambling revenues will lead to better funded schools and hospitals.

Even under the present OLG regime, there are those who gamble to excess. A by University of Lethbridge professors Robert Williams and Robert Wood found over one third of OLG revenue comes from the 5 per cent of gamers who are “problem gamblers.”

I appreciate the sacrifice that those people, and their families, are making to pay for schools and hospitals for the rest of us, but surely there must be a fairer way of raising revenue?

Professor Chen begins with the simple observation that some languages make a stronger distinction between the present and the future than others. For example, a German speaker expecting precipitation could say, “ Morgen regnet es”. Literally, “It rains tomorrow.” English speakers, on the other hand, must distinguish clearly between “it is raining now” and “it will rain tomorrow.”

There is a surprisingly large variation in the way that languages mark time. All of the Germanic languages, except for English, are “weak-FTR (future-time reference) languages”, making no clear distinction between present and future actions, as are most East Asian languages, including Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese. Some African languages fit into the weak-FTR category too. Southern European languages, on the other hand, are “strong-FTR languages”, drawing a clear distinction between present and future, as are Middle Eastern and most South Asian languages.

The list of weak-FTR languages is enough to give away the conclusion of Professor Chen’s paper: people who speak such languages save more. Saving requires us to make a choice: I will eat that marshmallow after lunch, not now. English, with the obligatory use of “will eat”, forces a person to think about delaying pleasure. Professor Chen argues that this awareness of delay, this consciousness of deferral, makes speakers of strong-FTR languages like English more likely to eat the marshmallow, to consume today instead of tomorrow.

Language indeed correlates strongly with differences in savings rates across OECD countries. Even controlling for demographic differences, unemployment rates and religious differences, strong-FTR countries like Greece have significantly lower savings rates than weak-FTR countries like Norway. The problem with cross-country studies, however, is that there are always alternative explanations for their findings. For example, many of the weak-FTR OECD countries are in northern Europe. Perhaps it is centuries of setting aside food for long cold winters, rather than language, that is behind these countries’ higher savings rates.

Yet Professor Chen has other evidence to back up the connection between language and savings. Using the World Values Survey and the European Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement, he has obtained information on the savings decisions of hundreds of thousands people. To make sure that his results are not driven by particular government policies or economic circumstances, he compares weak-FTR and strong-FTR speakers in the same country. For example, in Switzerland, he compares German speakers with those who speak French and Italian. In Singapore, he compares people who speak Malay and Mandarin (weak-FTR languages) with people who speak English and Tamil (strong-FTR languages). Again, he finds lower savings rates among those who speak languages that distinguish clearly between the present and future.

Moreover, it is not just savings that are affected by language. Professor Chen finds similar patterns when he looks at smoking and obesity rates. People who speak strong-FTR languages are more likely to smoke, and more likely to be obese. An English speaker, announcing his intention to get in shape, says “I will go running this evening.” The words “will go” mean “not now, later.” A Mandarin speaker, however, would say “I… this evening … go running”. The verb form is the same for running now and running later; the words “this evening” make it obvious when the running will take place. It is not that Mandarin speakers do not have ways of expressing future intentions or past happenings. Rather, Mandarin does not force its speakers to distinguish between past and present, now and later — and, as such, does not encourage sloth.

I am not entirely convinced that speaking English, or another strong-FTR language, makes people fat, or causes smoking. These behaviours are the product of so many complex factors. But Professor Chen’s paper made me think, and will continue to do so.

Three years on, a tenuous “he-covery” seems to be under way – male unemployment rates fell last year, and the percentage of men with jobs rose.

Now it’s the ladies’ turn. °ż˛ÔłŮ˛ą°ůľ±´Ç’s calls for deep cuts to financial, administrative and secretarial jobs throughout the public service. Strictly speaking, the report recommends cutting costs; automating, streamlining and consolidating the delivery of services. Yet administrative costs equal administrative jobs – jobs that are, 8 times out of 10, held by women.

The bulk of Ontario government spending goes to MUSH – Municipalities, Universities, Schools and Hospitals. Overall spending cannot be reduced substantially without making cuts in these areas. There are about 280,000 teachers and professors in Ontario, and 65 per cent of them are female. The Drummond report recommends larger class sizes for elementary and secondary school teachers, and “flexible” teaching loads for university professors. Yet more students per teacher mean fewer teaching jobs. Just as a downturn in the construction sector leads to male unemployment, a downturn in the teaching sector leads to female unemployment.

The recommended changes to health care delivery will also affect many Ontarians. The Drummond Report recommends “Where feasible, services should be shifted to lower – cost caregivers.” The lowest-cost caregivers of all are wives and husbands, mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, friends and neighbours. The Drummond Report recommends that Ontario “increase the use of home-based care where appropriate to reduce costs without compromising excellent care.”

Who is this excellent care going to be provided by? Over half of Canadians are single, divorced or widowed – there might not be someone waiting at home to provide care. Even if there is – what are the costs to caregivers?

In the aftermath of the he-cession, Ontario families are relying on women’s incomes to pay the mortgage. The wife is the main breadwinner, earning more than her husband, in almost a third of Ontario households. Even in families where Dad is the main breadwinner, Mom’s job is often the one providing a steady income, along with dental or health benefits.

The he-cession has been tough. The upcoming she-cession will be another rough ride for the tens of thousands of workers whose jobs will be eliminated, and the hundreds of thousands of people who rely upon those incomes.

The figures in this article are the most recent numbers available in t ables 282-0002, 282-0010 and 051-0010.

Yet while Canada’s recent immigrants struggle in the labour market, earning significantly less than the native born, Australia’s immigrants experience a much smaller earnings gap.

A recent by University of Waterloo professor Mikal Skuterud and his Australian co-author, Andrew Clarke, attempts to discover Australia’s secret.

Is it Australia’s track record of economic growth? Something about the way wages are determined in Australia? Or is it Australia’s immigration policy, a model that has captured the imagination of policy makers in Ottawa?

In the late 1990s, Australia introduced two major changes to its immigration program. First, it introduced mandatory English language testing. Second, it began pre-screening immigrants like dentists, nurses or engineers, ensuring that their professional credentials met Australian standards.

The aim of the new Australian rules was to improve an immigrant’s labour market success. Immigrants who were already fluent in English would not, policy makers thought, struggle the way that non-English speakers do. Pre-screening would speed up the process of credential recognition. Immigrants would be able to get jobs in their field right away, instead of driving taxis.

Clarke and Skuterud tested the success of the Australian policy by focusing in on three specific groups of immigrants: men of Chinese, Indian and British origin.

In theory, because Australia generally expects Chinese immigrants to pass a rigorous English language test, and have credentials equivalent to Australian ones, immigrants from China should do relatively well in Australia — better than in Canada, where immigrants do not go through such intensive pre-screening.

For British immigrants, who typically speak English fluently, and have professional credentials that meet Canadian and Australian standards, Australia’s pre-screening rules should not make much difference. Very few British immigrants would be screened out by English language testing and credential assessment. Immigrants from the U.K. should, therefore, do about the same in Canada and Australia.

India falls somewhere in the middle. English is widely spoken, but Indian credentials are not always comparable to Canadian or Australian ones. Still, the Australian rules would be expected to screen out some of the less qualified immigrants from India — raising the average skill level of Indian immigrants, and thus their labour market success.

That’s the theory. But what was the reality?

Clarke and Skuterud found no evidence that Australia’s immigration policy helped immigrants succeed in the labour market. Australia’s carefully pre-screened Chinese immigrants do no better than immigrants admitted under Canada’s points and family reunification schemes. As the researchers put it, “neither the employment nor earnings estimates for Australia’s Chinese immigrants …suggest improvements in average performance concomitant with Australia’s tightening immigration policy.” As for immigrants from India, according to Clarke and Skuterud, “the earnings shortfalls of Indian migrants evident in the 1980s actually worsened with the tightening of Australia’s selection [criteria].

So why does the average Australian immigrant do better than the average Canadian immigrant? Clarke and Skuterud argue that the new immigration policy led to a shift in the ethnic composition of Australian immigrants. Growth in immigration from Asia tailed off when the new rules were introduced. Compared to Canada, Australia now attracts relatively fewer Asian immigrants, and far more British ones. Less than 5 per cent of the recent Canadian arrivals in Clarke and Skuterud’s data are of U.K. origin, compared to 20 per cent of people coming to Australia. In both countries, immigrants from the U.K. are rapidly assimilated into local labour markets, quickly achieving earnings and employment levels similar to those of native-born Canadians. Immigrants in Australia do better, on average, than immigrants in Canada, because more belong to rapidly assimilated immigrant groups.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has recently announced plans to reform Canada’s immigration system, and it seems likely that the government will adopt at least some elements of the Australian model.

Yet Australian-style rules might play out differently in this country. Canada could throw its doors open to British immigrants, but it’s not clear how many would choose to come. Australia has better beaches. Even with tighter entry requirements, Canada will continue to be an attractive destination for Asian immigrants, with our economic opportunities, strong educational system, and thriving communities.

The key policy question then becomes: how can Canada help new immigrants succeed? The bottom line of Clarke and Skuterud’s paper is that Australia’s more rigorous screening of immigrants has not ended their labour market woes: immigrants of Chinese and Indian origin struggle there as much as here. Other studies, however, have identified a strategy that does work: encouraging young immigrants, especially ones who have at least part of their education in Canada. The earlier someone comes to Canada, the better their prospects of labour market success.

Not the over 50s: they’ll still be able to start claiming at 65 as planned.

Not many of the under 50s, either. Some under-50s won’t protest because they can’t be bothered. It’s not worth fighting to get a few thousand dollars of Old Age Security payments a couple of decades from now.

Other under-50s won’t protest because they believe an increase in the pension age won’t affect them: people who enjoy their jobs, and plan on working until 67 in any event; high income people, who would have to repay any Old Age Security anyway.

An increase in the OAS eligibility age might also be accompanied by an increase in the age at which RRSPs must be converted to RRIFs, or an easing of the RRIF withdrawal rules, bolstering support for a change in the pension age.

As , increasing the age at which people are entitled to receive Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement won’t produce huge savings. But it’s not the absolute savings that matter, it’s the savings relative to the political cost incurred – and for an increase in the pension age, those political costs will be manageable.

That’s why the the U.S. is raising its , and the U.K. is raising its . We will raise our pension age because it saves money, and has little political cost.

Thus the question is not if the pension age will be increased, but when. As the accompanying graph shows, 1959 saw the highest number of births ever recorded in Canada: 461,703 babies. After that, the number of births fell slightly, and then dropped sharply with the advent of the birth control pill. (Immigration reduces the relative impact of, but does not eliminate, the baby boom bulge.)

For an increase in the pension age to achieve substantial cost savings, it will have to be in place when those 1959 babies hit 65 in 2024.

I’m predicting that the pension age will gradually be increased to 67, in 3- or 6-month increments, by 2023. Canada Pension Plan already allows people to claim earlier or later than 65: those provisions may be altered slightly, or left unchanged.

What about reforming our health care system? That can wait until the 1959 babies are about to run up serious health care bills — sometime around 2033.