Armine Yalnizyan
“We’ve never been so close to tackling our biggest challenges. We could yoke the strengths of a powerful new cohort of young workers and breathtaking technologies to the momentum of population aging, extreme climate events and care systems in crisis. We could make every job a good job, the foundation of tackling everything else.”
Armine Yalnizyan is a leading Canadian economist and a business columnist for the Toronto Star. The recipient of the 2023 Galbraith Prize in Economics, Armine’s lecture was on the evolution of economic thought and the economics of caring. She is a co-founder of The Care Economy Project.
Armine served as a senior economic policy advisor to the federal Deputy Minister of Employment and Social Development Canada in 2018 and 2019. She helped shape and advance the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Inequality Project from 2006 to 2016. She provided weekly business commentary for CBC from 2011 to 2018. Armine was the Vice President and President of the Canadian Association for Business Economics from 2013 to 2019.
Armine has been the Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers since 2018.
Her take on inclusive economic growth has revealed the major factors at play: demographic (population aging), geopolitical (forced migration due to political instability, climate disasters), technological (automation, gigification of work) and macro-economic (slower growth, persistent economic inequality and growing corporate power concentration). She has a pragmatic vision for how to rebalance the scales: through greater worker bargaining power, regulation and taxation of corporations, and the provision of public services.
Find more of Armine’s fellowship work in this archive and on Substack.
Armine’s work on Canada’s care economy took centre stage in 2020. She popularized the terms “she-cession” and “she-covery”, informing popular understanding of the recession’s disproportionate impact on women. As shutdowns ebbed and flowed, she explained what an “equitable recovery” could look like, giving shape to the very concept of a care economy. She built the case for public investments in social infrastructure—child care, elder care, and health care—that could guarantee a healthy and growing middle class for a generation.
“The care economy already provides over one out of five jobs in the economy… Economic growth can’t be sustained without the care economy. Delivered with or without love, care is the foundation of economic growth,” Armine says.
Her ongoing inquiry into the care economy explores four themes.
The Care Workforce
We all need care at different points in our lives. Everyday, care workers—mostly racialized women who are personal support workers, early childhood educators, home care aids, disability support workers, and long-term care staff—make it possible for the rest of us can go to work. Reliance on these essential workers was visible during the pandemic, and even clearer as the population ages. Soon, one in four people in Canada will be seniors.
- Learn more about the undervaluing of care work
- Read more about the demand for care work
The Economics of Care
Care work already accounts for over 13% of GDP, making it a third larger than manufacturing and nearly twice the size of construction or finance. As the population ages and more workers retire than enter the labour market, Canada’s economy won’t grow without care work. If there aren’t enough care workers to meet rising needs, others—especially women—will be forced to reduce their paid work or leave the labour force altogether. This will constrain innovation, stall productivity, and deepen inequality.
- Learn more about how care work could drive middle class growth
- Check out this interview about Canada’s care economy
- Read Peggy Moss’ reflections on the “who cares” economy
The Profitization of Care
A “tapeworm economy” takes hold when profit-driven corporations feed off publicly funded systems, extracting value without reinvesting in quality or care. Care provides a guaranteed, often government-backed stream of regular revenue. That’s why private equity is moving in—buying up child care centres, long-term care homes, and home care agencies. When profit, not people, drives decision-making, the results can be devastating: worse care, underpaid and overstretched workers, and shortages in critical services like child care spaces or long-term care beds.
- Learn more about the tapeworm economy
- Read more about profitization in health care
- Dig deeper into how private equity is gutting long-term care
- Learn more about safeguarding our care systems
The Power of Care Workers
Call it “Hot Labour Summer” or just the latest chapter in a long fight for workers’ rights, care workers and others are claiming and using their collective power. Amid an affordability crisis and rising corporate profits, they are fighting for decent working conditions, better wages, and job security—especially for temporary and migrant workers who earn the least.
- Listen to a podcast on the challenges facing gig workers
- Read more about corporate power and inflation
- Read more about regularizing undocumented workers