Canada has ceded its most timely labour-market signals to a few U.S.-based platforms that collect and monetize job postings, résumés, and wage indicators. Private companies such as LinkedIn, Burning Glass (Lightcast), and Vicinity Jobs harvest postings and sell analytics that influence immigration targets, reskilling investments, and industrial planning. Government labour data is fragmented, slow, and costly to access, and the federal Job Bank was never modernized for search-index and API eras. Job seekers migrated to commercial sites, centralizing the country's labour graph on servers outside Canada and exposing workers to pervasive platform surveillance.
Not very. The data sucks. Information is patchy, outdated, and spread across multiple unconnected surveys and portals. We once had more transparent and accessible alternatives to these platforms. Canada spends millions on labour surveys and runs a federally backed Job Bank that was once a digital marvel. But we never rebuilt it for the era of search indexes and API feeds.
Meanwhile, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn already knows, because the recruiters paid for their ads last night. We have allowed a handful of American platforms to become the undisputed stewards of Canada's real-time labour market pulse, even though that data now informs immigration targets, reskilling funds, and billion-dollar industrial bets. The worst part is that we've come to accept a system where private platforms hoard core economic intelligence and treat it like business as usual.
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