If you were following the Canadian news in 2021, you would have heard about the "labour crunch." As the chart below shows, Canada saw an unprecedented increase in job vacancies between January 2021 and May 2022. By the summer of 2022, the total number of vacancies in the country exceeded 1 million jobs and many people were getting worried. A closer look at the data reveals that the vacant jobs were overwhelmingly jobs requiring no more than a high school diploma. But why was there suddenly so many job openings for low-skill workers?By far the most common explanation I was hearing in the summer of 2022 was that the "baby boomers" (and we all know there are lots of them!) were retiring and there weren't enough young people to replace them all. At first blush, that makes sense, except for one thing-the number of workers in Canada's labour force was higher in the May 2022 than it had ever been up to that point. It certainly didn't look like all the workers were disappearing.In August 2022, my teacher spoke with Paul Haavardsrud, the host of CBC Radio's The Cost of Living, about Canada's"labour crunch." The highlights of our conversation aired on national CBC radio on Sunday August 7. Please listen to the episode here as it will need to be summarized : https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/why-higher-interest-rates-could-solve-the-labour-crunch-1.6540124. Click on the audio clip to listen to the 10 minute and 30 second episode.In the episode you will hear me providing a different explanation for the increase in job vacancies.Whereas the baby-boom explanation suggests the problem isn't going to disappear any time soon, my explanation suggested that the "labour crunch" problem would likely fix itself over the following 12-month horizon. If you look at what happened to job vacancies between the summer of 2022 and 2023 in the chart above, you'll see that this is exactly what happened. Job vacancies have fallen in the past 12 months almost as fast as they increased in the previous 18 months.Imagine that you are speaking to a friend about this issue, and they tell you that the labour crunch is a serious problem that the government needs to address. Since you have listened to the Cost of Living podcast on this issue, you believe that your friend is wrong. To convince your friend, write a one-page summary of the episode that makes clear, in plain and simple language, why the "labour crunch" problem is not something to worry about. To make your explanation as clear as possible, rely on the demand-supply model of a competitive market to explain what has been happening in Canada's low-skill labour markets in recent years.The style of writing should not be formal academic writing, since that will bore your friend and she will stop reading. Therefore, do not include formal references and citations. Also, do not quote directly from the Cost of Living episode. If you want to bring in ideas from elsewhere, include it in the text of the writing. For example, if you read something about the labour crunch in the Toronto Star newspaper, you should write something like: "According to an article titled "The Labour Crunch" that I read in the Toronto Star on September 2, the"

Total number of job vacancies in Canada 1,100,000 - 1,000,000 900,000.- 800,000 - 700,000 - 600,000 - 500,000 - 400,000 300,000 - 200,000 - 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 Note: Data are seasonally adjusted. Source: Statistics Canada Table 14-10-0432-01. Charted by @mikalskuterud