Employment Minister Jason Kenney has been talking up Canada's labour and skills shortage for months.
This storyline got a boost last month, when the Conservative government released a report claiming the country's job vacancy rate has been "increasing steadily since 2009."
Conveniently, this claim helped explain away the expansion of the controversial Temporary Foreign Workers program under the Conservatives, which has seen tens of thousands of migrant workers flooding into Canada to fill "McJobs" in the service sector.
The problem? It’s not true that Canada's job vacancy is up, according to a new report by the Parliamentary Budget Office.
The PBO discovered that the government relied on unreliable data from online classifieds website Kijiji to come to this conclusion. Turns out there's no national labour shortage or skills mismatch; Statistics Canada has found the same thing.
Watch Kenney tap dance around Kijiji-gate in the House of Commons in response to questions from the Opposition.
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Photo: YouTube