Canada added another 378,000 net new jobs in September, according to the latest Labour Force Survey from Statistics Canada, as the country continues to recover positions lost earlier this year in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And almost all the new jobs added are full-time positions – of the 378,000 new jobs, 44,000 were part-time.
Last month’s gains mean that the job market in Canada is now within about 720,000 positions of where it was in February, before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. March and April saw mass layoffs across the country and 3 million Canadians losing their jobs. The numbers started to bounce back in May, and Canada has added more new jobs every month since.
Last month’s surge means that Canada’s economy has officially recovered more than three-quarters of the jobs lost since the pandemic started. By comparison, the US has only gained back a little more than half of the jobs it lost.
Almost every province in the country added jobs – Prince Edward Island saw a decline of 800 while New Brunswick held steady – but the most gains were in Ontario (168,000), Quebec (77,000), British Columbia (55,000) and Alberta (38,000).
September’s gains were enough to push Canada’s unemployment rate down to 9%. Canada’s jobless rate hit an all-time high of 13.7% in May but has been steadily falling every month since then. In February, Canada’s unemployment rate sat at 5.6%.
While Canada’s job market continues to improve, it is still far from what it was pre-COVID-19. About one-quarter of Canadians (4.2 million people) are still working from home – twice as many as usual.
There are still 1.8 million people in Canada who are officially categorized as unemployed, which means they want a job but cannot find one. And there are another 1.3 million workers affected by shutdowns due to COVID-19, which means they are employed but are working less than they usually would or would like to.
Published on Oct. 14, 2020.
