By Dan MacLeod
"It's cold out there today!" says the local weather reporter with a smile, showing off her straight white teeth."Minus 30 with the wind-chill! Make sure you bundle up before heading off to work!"
We've grown accustomed to the phony smile, the fake enthusiasm, the exclamation points after each sentence, but in this case, the message itself is falsified. It brings to mind the choreography of a Jacques Tati film where a dozen front doors open at the same time, and a dozen corporate clones in identical suits exit, briefcases in hand. Here in Montreal, however, one in five people is unemployed.
You wouldn't know it from listening to the news or reading the papers, though. At the beginning of each month, the government trots out economic statistics which are dutifully published and broadcast verbatim. In 1999, Montreal's jobless rate officially fluctuated between 8 and 11 percent.
All year long, those figures were hammered into the city's collective consciousness once a month via four local papers, six TV networks and a couple of dozen radio stations. French or English, public broadcasting or private, the message never varied.
The Canadian Labor Congress released a report, also in 1999, which showed that only 36 percent of unemployed citizens received unemployment benefits. This wasn't news for the teachers, nurses and social workers who deal with the effects of poverty on a daily basis. For everyone else, it was news — for a day. The report made the front page of most papers and was worth 60 seconds on the evening news. Some journalists explained that changes to Canada's unemployment program meant fewer people were eligible. Others dismissed the report with the aside that one can make statistics say anything. And that was it. By the next day, the story was forgotten.
A couple of years ago, I decided to figure out what the numbers actually were. It took 17 phone calls to provincial bureaucrats (in charge of welfare benefits) and federal bureaucrats (in charge of "employment" benefits). At the time, 334,285 Quebecois received unemployment-benefit checks, and another 426,317 "capable of working" were on welfare. Thus, 760,602 people were jobless among an "active" population of 3,563,000. That's over 21 percent of the population in question, but the media were claiming only 12.5 percent were jobless.
This discrepancy between official figures and actual facts appears to be true in other countries. One of Montreal's alternative weeklies recently claimed that the British government had changed its unemployment program "nine times in the past 18 years" to keep the numbers down. As well, a journalist from Lyon told me that she was unable to find out from the French government whether the official 13.5 percent unemployment rate included people on welfare.
In fact, real unemployment in Canada was considerably higher than 21 percent when I investigated government claims. A person who has run out of unemployment benefits won't qualify for welfare if his or her spouse has a job; that person simply disappears from the stats. Then, too, unemployed college grads who wind up returning to school — thus incurring more and more debt — are officially "students,"even if they spend all their free time applying for jobs. Most homeless people, of whom there are some 10,000 in Montreal alone, don't show up in the welfare stats either. Without a fixed address, you can't get a check.
Why do the media unanimously accept the government's unemployment figures? It's pack journalism at its best: A reporter who dared to contradict every other news outlet in the city would be probably be suspended. Also, on the international level, these stats are "official." Canada provides the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development with numbers it knows are two times too low. To question locally what goes out globally would be serious indeed. In Canada, the discrepancy between reality and what the politicians and the media would have us believe has reached the point where intellectuals — on those public-broadcasting talk-shows no one listens to — add, in passing, "Of course, real unemployment is about double..." Social workers say it's dead simple: You take the official rate, multiply by two and then add a bit more.
Why are the media so recalcitrant? Is it a case of just being lazy, or are they willfully obtuse? Most reporters and producers earn between 50,000 and 70,000 Canadian dollars (U.S. $35,000-$50,000) and have "permanent" status — a kind of tenure — whereas 43 percent of Montrealers (according to government statistics) are either "low-income"or "poor." The Jewish expression, "What I do not see, does not exist," may be the best explanation. Then, too, Canada sleeps next to the elephant. The U.S. is our biggest trading partner by far, and American culture is omnipresent in Canada. It's not just TV and movies and music: As social democracies collapse around the world, the American political model is right next door. The U.S. has proved, among other things, that by ignoring the poorest 20 percent of society you can have a damn good health-care system for everybody else.
In Montreal, government cutbacks have closed half a dozen hospitals and thrown thousands of nurses out of work. Sick people now wait on stretchers in E.R. corridors for up to two days before being treated. Some die. But the media, like the politicians they interview, are unanimous: no matter what the social cost, the deficit must be held at zero. This has been the mantra for 16 years in a row, even though Canada went from a Conservative government to a Liberal one in 1993. It's the Liberal Finance Minister, Paul Martin, who keeps saying our economy is "booming." He says it every time he unveils the annual budget, and the papers and broadcast media lead with his claim as if it were fact, not self-fulfilling prophecy. In a way, he's right. Canadian corporations have never made so much money. For example, our six national banks showed a healthy profit of 5 billion Canadian dollars in 1995. They've since laid off over 50,000 employees; in 1999, profits reached 9 billion Canadian dollars (U.S. $6.3 billion).
Two years ago, while writing a feature for an American paper, I interviewed research scientists, engineers, professors and communications specialists who earned an average of 500 Canadian dollars a week (U.S. $335) at jobs which were supposed to pay two to three times that amount. Many were part of government programs designed to keep the unemployment numbers down. In reality, these "job-creation" schemes allow corporations and institutions to avoid hiring regular workers at regular wages.
When I pitched the story to a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation TV executive, he called my findings "anecdotal evidence." When I offered my research on federal unemployment and provincial welfare numbers, I was told math-based analyses were boring, and that the CBC got complaints when stories on joblessness were broadcast.
What's frightening is that the CBC is the public-broadcasting wing of Canadian media. The commercial networks devote little money to news and even less to current affairs. In the fall of '97, I asked five CBC-Montreal reporters what the real unemployment rate was. None of them knew. One did say it was "way higher than what we hear in the media." The scribes continue to scribble away, taking down what is said officially, asking few questions — a far cry from Woodward and Bernstein.
Fourteen months ago, the government announced plans to "redefine" the poverty level in Canada. The National Post explained the good news on the front page. By using what's called the "market-basket measure," statisticians could "prove" that only 12 percent of the population was poor instead of the actual 17 percent. This would "halve the annual cost to Ottawa of attempting to meet Canada's commitment to wipe out child poverty by 2000, to $3.3 billion from $6.6 billion."
The Chrétien government promised to wipe out child poverty in the mid-'90s, part of a fiscal-responsibility plan which has all but destroyed Canada's famous social safety net. Social scientists joked that the obvious way to help children was to make their parents less poor.
In any case, when the Year 2000 deadline came, child poverty was considerably worse. Reporting the numbers, the media appeared surprised. The politicians, meanwhile, were on Christmas break.
Dartmouth professor David Blanchflower sums up the problem quite succinctly in a study published in the American review, Labor Economics. Despite what everyone has been telling us — that the future of work is in working for yourself — he shows that the percentage of independent workers is actually decreasing in the industrialized world. "Journalists and politicians repeat these things and people end up believing them," writes Blanchflower. "I'm trying to show that there's no proof!"
- Dan MacLeod is an independent journalist living in Montreal. He was formerly a foreign correspondent for Radio-Canada, a French-language counterpart of the CBC, as well as a TV reporter/producer.
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