PEI Unemployment story is bogus

Employment on PEI Feb 2009

Story from CBC Charlottetown

CBC Charlottetown has to be one of the worst news organizations I’ve seen.

CBC are “rip and read” artists.

The reporters take stories off the internet and just read them on camera like that’s all it takes.

Holland College journalism students could do their jobs.

This week the government announced the unemployment numbers on Tuesday and CBC National first reported how bad it is – 1.3 million unemployed – then dropped to the less dramatic story of 560,000 collecting unemployment benefits.

On PEI that gets reported as EI claimant numbers fall on P.E.I. .

Of course that’s only part of the story. To tell the whole story you have to research it. CBC doesn’t research stories. CBC news people are lazy: they just rip and read.

Any fool knows that the unemployment goes up on PEI during the winter. What the government press release talks about is people who are collecting unemployment. That number fell by 240 but the number of real unemployed actually went up by 2,000.

To find that out, the CBC reporter would type into Google “PEI Employment” at which time the Statistics Canada report would show exactly 2,000 fewer people working on PEI than last February.

Why the two different versions. A little more research shows that the Island population didn’t drop 2,000 people but that fewer people qualified for unemployment benefits. That’s the real story. It takes about 15 minutes to sort it all out. Is CBC lazy, corrupt, inept, untrained, under motivated?