In every forecaster’s life, a little rain must sometimes fall. Assumptions held for too long can leave you left behind as new information gets overlooked. Confirming evidence bias can cause you to put more weight on the data that support your views and underweight those that don’t. Hindsight bias can lead to you overweigh past experiences that may or may not be relevant to current events. And then there’s the data itself. If it’s garbage in, it’s garbage out.

Following last Friday’s release of Statistics Canada’s November 2017 Labour Force Survey (LFS), the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy (IFSD) has updated its Canada JØLTS analysis for October 2017.

National Housing Day is fast approaching and the National Housing Strategy is just around the corner. With this in mind, staff at the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy (IFSD) thought it would be a good time to do a stocktaking of how governments are doing with the billions of dollars they are already spending on homelessness. The exercise was motivated by one fundamental question: Does the current funding structure for homelessness programs produce the desired results? A summary of the results can be found here, keeping in mind that this analysis exclusively focuses on initiatives to support Canada’s population of homeless people and does not address current and future funding for affordable housing that is not tied to homelessness initiatives.

Following last Friday’s release of Statistics Canada’s October 2017 Labour Force Survey (LFS), the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy (IFSD) has updated its Canada JØLTS analysis for September 2017.

One of the more interesting unknowns in economics today is why economic activity has taken off, particularly in advance economies, but inflation in those countries has remained weak. This blogpost will examine why the strong-growth-weak-inflation dynamic has been observed in Canada, and why this phenomenon is about to come to an end. It concludes that wage growth has lagged advances in the Canadian economy and labour market, and that impending wage growth due to a tight labour market will drive higher core Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation. But, as the Bank of Canada has telegraphed that it plans to take its time in raising interest rates, it could very quickly find itself behind the curve.

Tomorrow, Minister of Finance Bill Morneau will present the Fall Economic Statement (FES) of the Government of Canada. This document is largely considered an opportunity for the federal government to update Canadians on major policies being implemented and the state of the economy and public finances, as well as to announce new measures. And in the FES, a lot attention is generally directed towards the evolution of the fiscal situation, e.g. the budgetary balance and the fiscal outlook, since the release of the Budget earlier in the year.

Following last Friday’s release of Statistics Canada’s September 2017 Labour Force Survey (LFS), the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy (IFSD) has updated its Canada JØLTS analysis for August 2017.

Back in March, we published a blog post about @NowcastCanada, the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy’s (IFSD’s) nowcast of real GDP growth, as well as the IFSD’s nowcast of the unemployment rate. Our full report on forecasting the unemployment rate using a Google index is now available on our website. See the updated blog post below for more information.

The potential scope and impact of CBAs in future public infrastructure spending remains an open question but will depend importantly on the building of capacity at the community level. A report prepared by Armine Yalnizyan, the well-known economist consulting for the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy (IFSD), draws from experiences in Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere to explore opportunities, best practices, and potential governance supports to help maximize the returns on public infrastructure investments.