[URBAN NOTE] God's glory on the TTC

Somehow, The Philadelphia Trumpet has managed to become disturbingly common on the TTC. At Dupont station, it's possible to pick up issues on the free newspaper stand alongside the Metros and the Eye Weeklys and the Nows. The influence appears to be spreading: On the subway ride to work, I saw one of the Trumpet's partisans--one of those wide-eyed unblinking types--discoursing at length about Israel's role in the coming Endtimes.

[LINK] It goes up and down

It has been a stressful few days at the Toronto Stock Exchange. See The Toronto Star for typical coverage.

The Toronto Stock Exchange's S&P/TSX composite index plunged 604.99 points, or 4.75 per cent, to close at 12,132.13. Stocks on the exchange lost about $90 billion in value in the biggest point drop since the tech bubble burst nearly seven years ago. And yesterday's sell-off was on top of a 7 per cent drop last week that already had wiped out all of the gains made on the Toronto market last year.

Since Canada's dominant market hit a high in late October, shares on the TSX have lost more than $300 billion, or 17 per cent, hurting nearly every Canadian who holds shares, either directly or in mutual funds or pension plans.

"If you have money in a portfolio and don't need it for a period of time, then you're not affected," Allan Kalin, a financial planner with Polson Bourbonniere Financial Planning Associates in Markham, told the Star's Paola Loriggio. "But if you're 70 and you need that money for your retirement, then that's definitely not a pleasant experience."

Many more could be hurt in the long run, he added. "If companies can't get capital – and that seems to be one of the issues – then jobs could be lost over this."

"The sentiment is just phenomenally negative out there," said Craig Wright, chief economist at RBC Financial Group. "We're looking at a very sluggish U.S. economy. ... Everyone is willing to jump on any negative news, while anything positive is being ignored."

The fact that this morning the TSX has recovered two-thirds of yesterday's losses speaks as much to the extreme volatility of the Canadian markets as to anything else, like reasonably strong economic fundamentals.

[LINK] "Everyone who wants to go to Finland, raise your hands"

Sami Sillanpää's article in the English-language version of Helsingin Sanomat explores new efforts in Finland to recruit guest workers from the Philippines, starting out in the Western Visayas' Iloilo City.

On the outskirts of Iloilo, sheds have been cobbled together out of sheet metal and cardboard. In the centre of this city of half a million people, there are a couple of department stores and a number of pawn shops.

Along Iznart Street there is a bright, orange office building, which is guarded, in the local fashion, by two men carrying shotguns.

The office on the sixth floor offers a way to get to Finland.

The tables in the ample office of Filscandia Manpower Recruitment Services are decorated with Finnish flags. Filscandia operates together with the Finnish Opteam.

The business of Opteam is to arrange employment abroad. It has brought hundreds of metal workers from Poland and Slovakia to Finland. The welders and lathe operators that it recruited are building Finland's sixth nuclear reactor in Olkiluoto.

"Finland's own labour resources are not sufficient to fill all of the open jobs. Statistics show this. In many fields there is already an acute shortage of labour", says Mika Eskola, deputy CEO of Opteam.

This is a business for Opteam, but Eskola likes to say that he is "saving Finland", in the ten years to come, more than 700,000 Finns are retiring. According to Eskola, the promotion of "work-based immigration" is the only way to keep the country working.

Recruitment of labour from Iloilo began about three months ago. Now the aim is to bring about 100 practical nurses to work with Esperi Care, which offers elderly care services.

Opteam is also recruiting cleaners, welders, and restaurant workers. "The goal is to build a significant network in the Philippines, which Finnish businesses can benefit from. By 2015 the aim is to bring tens of thousands of educated people to Finland."

Arno Tanner's essay at Migration Information explains that in the recent decades migrants to Finland have consisted mainly of citizens of other Nordic countries, migrants from the former Soviet Union including ethnic Finns, and refugees from across the world. As Sillanpää notes, guest worker programs on this scale are unprecedented in Finnish history.