Young Canadians faring well, earning more in today's economy: Desjardins

Nojoud Al Mallees, The Canadian Press

Young, educated workers today are earning more than in previous generations, according to a new report from Desjardins.  

But it's not all rosy for young Canadians, with women in particular facing declining mental health and ongoing barriers in the labour market.

The new report from Desjardins is the first in a series looking at how young Canadians are faring in today's economy.

"The narrative around how young people are faring tends to have a negative tone," said Randall Bartlett, senior director of Canadian economics for Desjardins and co-author of the report. 

"What we found in the data was a lot more room for optimism."

The report builds on recent census data that showed the Canadian population is highly educated, with a larger proportion of people holding a post-secondary degree than any other G7 country.

Desjardins found young Canadians are more educated today than in the past, with more of them holding college certifications and bachelor's degrees than many of the countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 

That has implications for earnings, given that those who complete a post-secondary education tend to earn more money throughout their lifetime. 

For the report, Desjardins compared the earnings of Canadians who graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1991 versus in 2001. 

They found the younger cohort earned several thousand dollars more each year, adjusted for inflation, than those who graduated a decade earlier, suggesting the return on education is rising. 

There are also more young people from lower-income families pursuing post-secondary education today than in previous generations. For those who come from families in the bottom 20 per cent of income earners, enrolment increased 28 per cent. That's compared with a 10 per cent increase in enrolment for young Canadians from families in the top 20 per cent of income earners. 

However, the report found that there are very real challenges in the labour market for young people as they move from school to the workplace.

Young women, for example, were facing declining mental health even before the pandemic hit, while young people in general saw their mental health decline significantly during the pandemic. 

Women also continue to disproportionately carry the burden of caring for a child or family member.

"If you look at adults ages 25 to 44, women report caring for children as the primary reason for working part-time, while it barely registers for men the same age," the report said.

Working fewer hours or leaving the labour market can result in lower earnings, which explains some of the wage gap between men and women. 

The report also highlights that young immigrants are doing better in the labour market than they have historically, but they still face challenges putting their skills to work. 

Desjardins chief economist and lead report author Jimmy Jean said these findings have implications for policymakers in Canada. 

The first is the important role subsidized childcare programs can play in helping women rejoin the labour market. Quebec, which has had subsidized childcare for over 20 years, has seen more women join the labour force during that time. 

Jean said the federal government's pursuit of a national childcare program, which aims to deliver childcare that costs on average $10 a day, is a good start. 

"(But) it needs to be made widely and easily accessible, without having to go through the long waiting time. So the execution of it will be crucial going forward," he said. 

Addressing mental health would also be a "very worthwhile investment," he said, noting that poor mental health can affect young people's abilities to successfully transition into the workforce. 

The other consideration for policymakers, Jean said, is how to make it easier for immigrants to get their foreign credentials recognized.

Amid labour shortages, various governments across Canada are moving to ease credential recognition, particularly for health care workers. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 17, 2023.

ChatGPT can decode fedspeak, predict stock moves from headlines

Justina Lee, Bloomberg News

The first wave of academic research applying ChatGPT to the world of finance is arriving — and judging by early results, the hype of the past few months is justified.

Two new papers have been published this month that deployed the artificial intelligence chatbot in market-relevant tasks — one in deciphering whether Federal Reserve statements were hawkish or dovish, and one in determining whether headlines were good or bad for a stock.

ChatGPT aced both tests, suggesting a potentially major step forward in the use of technology to turn reams of text from news articles to tweets and speeches into trading signals. 

That process is nothing new on Wall Street, of course, where quants have long used the kind of language models underpinning the chatbot to inform many strategies. But the findings point to the technology developed by OpenAI reaching a new level in terms of parsing nuance and context.

“It’s one of the rare cases where the hype is real,” said Slavi Marinov, head of machine learning at Man AHL, which has been using the technology known as natural language processing to read texts like earnings transcripts and Reddit posts for years.

In the first paper, titled Can ChatGPT Decipher Fedspeak?, two researchers from the Fed itself found that ChatGPT came closest to humans in figuring out if the central bank’s statements were dovish or hawkish. Anne Lundgaard Hansen and Sophia Kazinnik at the Richmond Fed showed that it beat a commonly used model from Google called BERT and also classifications based on dictionaries.  

ChatGPT was even able to explain its classifications of Fed policy statements in a way that resembled the central bank’s own analyst, who also interpreted the language to act as a human benchmark for the study. 

Take this sentence from a May 2013 statement: “Labour market conditions have shown some improvement in recent months, on balance, but the unemployment rate remains elevated.” The robot explained the line is dovish because it suggests the economy is not yet fully recovered. That was similar to the conclusion of the analyst — Bryson, described in the paper as “a 24-year-old male, known for his intelligence and curiosity.” 

In the second study, Can ChatGPT Forecast Stock Price Movements? Return Predictability and Large Language Models, Alejandro Lopez-Lira and Yuehua Tang at the University of Florida prompted ChatGPT to pretend to be a financial expert and interpret corporate news headlines. They used news after late 2021, a period that wasn’t covered in the chatbot’s training data. 

The study found that the answers given by ChatGPT showed a statistical link to the stock’s subsequent moves, a sign that the tech was able to correctly parse the implications of the news.

In an example about whether the headline “Rimini Street Fined $630,000 in Case Against Oracle” was good or bad for Oracle, ChatGPT explained that it was positive because the penalty “could potentially boost investor confidence in Oracle’s ability to protect its intellectual property and increase demand for its products and services.”

For most sophisticated quants it’s now almost run-of-the-mill to use NLP to gauge how popular a stock is from Twitter or to incorporate the latest headlines on a company. But the advances demonstrated by ChatGPT look set to open up whole worlds of new information and make the tech more accessible to a broader community of finance pros. 

To Marinov, while there’s no surprise machines can now read almost as well as people, ChatGPT can potentially speed up the whole process. 

When Man AHL was first building the models, the quant hedge fund was manually labeling each sentence as positive or negative for an asset to give the machines a blueprint for interpreting the language. The London-based firm then turned the whole process into a game that ranked participants and calculated how much they agreed on each sentence, so that all employees could get involved. 

The two new papers suggest ChatGPT can pull off similar tasks without even being specifically trained. The Fed research showed that this so-called zero-shot learning already exceeds prior technologies, but fine-tuning it based on some specific examples made it even better. 

“Previously you had to label the data yourself,” said Marinov, who also previously co-founded a NLP startup. “Now you could complement that with designing the right prompt for ChatGPT.” 

Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, also released a large language model for finance last month. 

Algonquin Power & Utilities terminates deal to buy Kentucky Power

The Canadian Press

ALGONQUIN POWER & UTILITIES (AQN:CT)

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Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp. says it has agreed with American Electric Power to terminate its deal to buy Kentucky Power Company and AEP Kentucky Transmission Co. Inc.

AQN chief executive Arun Banskota says the company's board of directors and management team decided that continuing with the transaction is not in the best interest of the company. 

He says they made the decision to cancel the deal, which was first announced in October 2021, "in light of the evolving macro environment."

The company says it is not required to pay a termination fee.

AQN says it continues to estimate that its adjusted net earnings per common share for the 2023 financial year will be in a range of 55 cents to 61 cents.

AQN expects to release its first quarter financial results on May 11, before market open.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 17, 2023.

Should you fight an eviction?

YES


Christopher Liew
Contributor
Published April 12, 2023 




Arriving home to a notice to vacate on your front door can be devastating, to say the least.

Seven per cent of respondents to a 2021 Canadian housing survey report being evicted at some point in their past, according to Statistics Canada. So you’re not alone.

Once a landlord issues a notice to vacate to a tenant, the tenant may have anywhere from two weeks to three months (depending on the province) to resolve the issue with their landlord or move out.

RELATED LINKS  Statistics Canada on Evictions in Canada

The good news is that you may be able to fight the eviction if you believe it’s unjust. Below, I’ll share some instances when you should consider fighting an eviction and explain how an eviction could affect your credit rating.

When should you consider fighting an eviction?

Most evictions occur due to the sale of property by a landlord (37 per cent) or the landlord wanting the unit for their own use (26 per cent), based on the same survey by Statistics Canada.

Not all evictions are justified, though.

If the eviction notice is found to have been unjustly issued, then you may even be able to counter-sue for damages.

With that in mind, here are some examples of when you should consider fighting an eviction.

1. Eviction for exercising your legal rights

If you believe that an eviction may have been issued in relation to exercising your legal rights, you may have a good case to fight it.

For example, let’s say that you sue your landlord for failing to maintain the property or violating their end of the lease agreement. Shortly after, you receive an eviction notice stating some obscure or inaccurate violation on your end.

There’s a good chance that you could win an appeal to overturn the eviction.

2. You didn’t receive a proper eviction notice

Each province has rules regarding how much time a landlord must give a tenant to vacate. If your landlord fails to adhere to provincial regulations, you may be able to overturn the eviction.

3. Discrimination-based eviction

If you believe your eviction notice was issued due to discrimination on your landlord’s behalf, you may have a good case to overturn it. There are laws in place to prevent a landlord from discriminating against a tenant over their race, religion, ancestry, gender, or sexual orientation.

For example, in the Smith vs. Mohan case in B.C., the landlord tried to evict a tenant of Indigenous descent for their cultural practice of “smudging” (burning sacred herbs). The tenant also shared several examples of the landlord making several racially insensitive remarks.

The court ruled that the smoke caused by the smudging was not enough of a disturbance or issue to warrant an eviction.

Smith (the tenant) was awarded $23,300 in compensation for lost wages, expenses, and damages to her dignity and self-respect.

4. Poorly maintained property

In some cases, you may be able to fight an eviction notice due to the landlord failing to maintain the residence.

For example, if there is a broken window or plumbing issue that prevents you from safely inhabiting your home and the landlord fails to repair the issue, then they might not be able to evict you if you decide to pay less rent to compensate for this mismanagement.

Can you fight an eviction if you didn’t sign a lease?

Verbal rental agreements can be complicated, which is why you should always make sure that there’s a formal, legally binding lease agreement signed by both you and your landlord.

Verbal agreements can be difficult to enforce. That being said, sometimes courts do respect verbal lease agreements.

For example, in the 2014 case, Johnson vs. Patry, the B.C. Supreme Court ruled that verbal tenancy agreements are enforceable and legitimate. This means landlords must give a proper eviction notice to a tenant, even if there’s only a verbal agreement. It also means that tenants living under a verbal lease agreement can fight an eviction notice.

Can an eviction impact your credit rating?

Receiving an eviction notice or being formally evicted from your residence won’t have a direct effect on your credit score, according to Equifax.

However, an eviction can indirectly affect your credit if your landlord reports unpaid fees and rent to the credit bureaus. This could also happen during an eviction dispute before the court makes a final decision.

Even if the court rules in your favour, you’ll need to send letters and evidence to the credit bureaus to get the negative marks removed from your report. This could take several weeks or even months, negatively impacting your credit score in the short-term.
Eviction can make it harder to find future housing

Perhaps the most problematic effect of receiving an eviction is that it could tarnish your rental history. When applying to new housing units, most applicants are asked whether or not they’ve been evicted before. Your response could hurt your approval, or the landlord may require you to pay a larger security deposit.

If you believe you have a good case, it’s worth seeking legal advice and disputing the eviction. If it’s overturned, it won’t hurt your rental history, and you may even be able to sue your landlord for damages.

Christopher Liew is a CFA Charterholder and former financial advisor. He writes personal finance tips for thousands of daily Canadian readers on his Wealth Awesome website.

Canadian-owned pork plants in jeopardy as soaring inflation dents demand

Elizabeth Elkin and Jen Skerritt, Bloomberg News

Hog plants are at risk of shutting as soaring inflation hampers demand for pork while feed costs climb.

Closely held Canadian HyLife Foods is looking for a buyer for its pork plant southwest of Minneapolis just three years after it purchased the facility, which processes about 1.2 million hogs annually. Olymel, another Canadian company, announced Friday it will permanently close its slaughter plant in Vallee-Jonction, Quebec, impacting about 1,000 workers.

“The decision was necessary to stop losses in the fresh pork sector, which have amounted to more than US$400 million over the past two years and are jeopardizing the entire company’s profitability,” Olymel Chief Executive Officer Yanick Gervais said in a statement.

Hog prices have been sliding amid concern pork supplies are outpacing demand for the meat. Additionally, the industry has faced labor shortages and rising costs of inputs like feed. That’s made it difficult for some operations to stay profitable.

A potential shutdown of HyLife’s plant would impact about 1,000 employees. Across the industry, many facilities are aging and require considerable investment to maintain and operate, making “under performing assets” heavily scrutinized, said Christine McCracken, senior analyst for animal protein at Rabobank. 

“Our industry has been facing unprecedented external challenges such as inflation, high grain costs, and exchange rates that are affecting businesses and consumers alike,” HyLife Chief Executive Officer Grant Lazaruk said in an emailed statement. 

 

CP Rail launches major clean-up effort after derailment in Maine

BNN Bloomberg

Canadian Pacific Kansas City railway crews faced a hefty cleanup after a freight train derailed in rural Maine on Saturday, setting several cars ablaze.

The train hit a track washout in a wooded area near Moosehead Lake in northwestern Maine, some 220 kilometres southeast of Quebec City, CPKC said in a release.

The railroad operator said three crew members were taken to a local hospital for non-life-threatening injuries Saturday and released the same day.

Locomotives and four derailed lumber cars went up in flames, with crews using booms — absorbent, tube-like barriers — to contain spilled diesel fuel, said CPKC spokeswoman C. Doniele Carlson.

Cars carrying drums of ethanol and another hazardous material also went off the rails but did not catch fire, she said. State officials said there is no threat to public safety.

The rail line is the same one where the fatal Lac-Mégantic disaster unfolded about 90 kilometres further west in 2013. Canadian Pacific did not own the track at the time.

At around 8:30 a.m. on Saturday, the CPKC train skidded off the tracks due to a washout caused by a clogged culvert under the rail line "because of winter debris, ice and mud," said Jim Britt, spokesman for the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.

A roughly three-kilometre access road must be carved out of an old logging road to support the salvage, cleanup and rail repair operation, he said in a phone interview.

"They're still receiving equipment, and there's a two-mile road that has to be put in. It's quite an undertaking," he said Sunday afternoon.

Rail consultant Greg Gormick said the derailment "could have been a lot worse," noting the incident happened near a large lake.

Canadian Pacific pledged to invest up to $90 million over three years to bring the U.S. portion of the Central Maine & Quebec Railway up to Federal Railroad Administration standards after completing its purchase of the railroad in January 2020.

"There's a large backlog of deferred maintenance," Gormick said.

The derailment happened one day after CP Rail chief executive Keith Creel drove home a platinum spike at a ceremony in Kansas City, Mo., to celebrate the company's purchase of the Kanas City Southern railway.

The combined company creates the only railway stretching from Canada through to the U.S. and Mexico and marks the continent's first major rail merger in more than two decades after a U.S. regulator approved the US$31-billion deal last month.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 16, 2023.

Canada's 7.4% emissions cut is still too slow to meet UN pledge

Robert Tuttle, Bloomberg News

APR 14, 2023

Canada has made significant progress in cutting greenhouse gas emissions from before COVID-19, but the pace is still too slow to meet international commitments, new data show.  

Emissions of carbon dioxide and other climate-warming gases in 2021 were 7.4 per cent below 2019 levels, according to a government report released Friday. Still, they were up 1.8 per cent from 2020 as the country emerged from pandemic lockdowns. 

And while emissions were 8.4 per cent below 2005 levels, the cuts will need to accelerate for Canada to achieve its United Nations commitment to reduce them by at least 40 per cent by 2030.

Emissions cuts in Canada, the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, have been slowed by rising crude output to meet increased global demand. The country’s oil-sands producers have pledged to zero out emissions from their operations by 2050, mostly through the deployment of a major carbon capture system that they’re seeking increased government support to finance. 

Emissions from oil and gas extraction in 2021 rose 4 per cent from a year earlier and were only 1 per cent below 2019 levels.   

Canada’s biggest reductions since 2019 have come from lower use of motor fuels and from utilities burning less coal. Cars and trucks emitted 12 per cent less in 2021 than two years earlier. Emissions from electricity and heat generation were 14 per cent below 2019 levels, reflecting lower coal use by utilities, particularly in Alberta. 

Forgotten Equation Could Be Key In Recycling CO2

By Brian Westenhaus - Apr 13, 2023

• Cornell scientists are using an electrochemical equation from 1903 to convert atmospheric CO2 into useful products.
• 
  
• The Cottrell equation is able to help researchers understand the CO2 reaction pathways, turning the gas from an environmental liability to a potential feedstock.
• 
  
• Recycling CO2 offers the opportunity to reduce the need to use fossil fuels, but cost and electricity supply, as well as political forces, are considerable challenges.

Cornell University scientists have dusted off an archaic – now 120 year old – electrochemical equation. The goal is to manage atmospheric carbon dioxide and convert the gas into a useful products.

The team’s work has been published in the journal ACS Catalysis.

The calculation – named the Cottrell equation for chemist Frederick Gardner Cottrell, who developed it in 1903 – can help today’s researchers understand the several reactions that carbon dioxide can take when electrochemistry is applied and pulsed on a lab bench.

The electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide presents an opportunity to transform the gas from an environmental liability to a feedstock for chemical products or as a medium to store renewable electricity in the form of chemical bonds, as nature does.

Lead author Rileigh Casebolt DiDomenico, a chemical engineering doctoral student at Cornell under the supervision of Prof. Tobias Hanrath offered the background, “For carbon dioxide, the better we understand the reaction pathways, the better we can control the reaction – which is what we want in the long term. If we have better control over the reaction, then we can make what we want, when we want to make it. The Cottrell equation is the tool that helps us to get there.”

The equation enables a researcher to identify and control experimental parameters to take carbon dioxide and convert it into useful carbon products like ethylene, ethane or ethanol.

Professor Hanrath commented that many researchers today use advanced computational methods to provide a detailed atomistic picture of processes at the catalyst surface, but these methods often involve several nuanced assumptions, which complicate direct comparison to experiments.

“The magnificence of this old equation is that there are very few assumptions,” Hanrath said. “If you put in experimental data, you get a better sense of truth. It’s an old classic. That’s the part that I thought was beautiful.”

DiDomenico said, “Because it is older, the Cottrell equation has been a forgotten technique. It’s classic electrochemistry. Just bringing it back to the forefront of people’s minds has been cool. And I think this equation will help other electrochemists to study their own systems.”

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, a Cornell Energy Systems Institute-Corning Graduate Fellowship and the Cornell Engineering Learning Initiative.

***

The idea to recycle CO2 is an attractive one. But the idea to “manage” the CO2 in the atmosphere is a bit alarming. That’s an idea where one finds the “Experts” that are going to decide on behalf of everyone. Its the questions of who, what, why and when, where, and how. Now the “experts” are telling us disaster is just few years away, after 50 years of about the same and being dead wrong. Trusting them with the fuel of life on earth is, well, alarming.

On the other hand! The atmosphere is nearing halfway to a CO2 content some think to be optimal. So the opportunity to recycle CO2 is becoming possible without dire threat. Recycling CO2 would put humanity into a current planetary carbon cycle. It could reduce the need to use fossil fuels exclusively. More resources is a good thing.

There is a catch. It takes electricity to reform the CO2. We’re not told how that might figure into the cost of the new products. The idea might die a death of a shortage of electrical power as the onslaught of the electric vehicle push is yet to really get into its stride. Last summer some people (California) didn’t have enough power to go around.

Its not science to blame, or industry or consumers. But the political forcing is going to be a severe problem, and soon.

By Brian Westenhaus via New Energy and Fuel