Jobless Rate Meets Bump In The Road

Well, it all can’t be good news, right? After facing a recession that saw hundreds of thousands of jobs lost throughout Canada, the Synergy Merchant Services Blog was all too happy to report about the numerous examples of how the nation was recovering over the past few months. Specifically taking a look at the job growth that was proving the country’s return to financial prosperity, we believed that only more good news was on the horizon.

Not the case, says QMI Agency’s Stefania Moretti in a report released this past weekend. Unfortunately, in the month of July, Canada experienced the loss of 9,000 jobs, with many of them being full-time positions. This occurrence has pushed the unemployment rate back up to 8 per cent.

Sadly, the job losses fell well short of the predictions economists made that Canada would expand by 13,000 full-time jobs last month. This shouldn’t be taken has overly horrific news, however. With the employment growth that the nation has enjoyed over the past several months, it was bound to hit a bump in the road sooner or later.

TD Economics senior economist Pascal Gauthier agrees: “This was slightly disappointing, albeit not entirely surprising, as this employment report came on the heels of a blistering 76,000 monthly pace of job creation set over the prior three month. Our assessment is that the lagging performance of full-time employment will not persist.”

Moretti notes that TD is predicting that Canada’s hiring policies should resume shortly with a predicted growth of 15,000 jobs per month over the next several quarters. In fact, some promising news did come out of the weekend report. She writes that “employment for students…improved 4.5% compared with 12 months earlier.”

The job loss spike in July was due in part to weak employment gains in a number of sectors. Moretti lists educational services, finance, insurance, real estate and leasing as industries that struggled last month. Manufacturing and public administration, on the other hand, were strong in their employment growth.

In fact, factory employment experienced its largest job increase in the past two years. With the addition of 29,000 new jobs last month, manufacturing employment is back at the levels it enjoyed a year ago. The strongest provinces in July were Alberta and British Columbia. These two provinces were the only ones in the country that saw job growth last month.

Moretti reminds us that the United States is still struggling to match Canada’s employment growth records. The U.S. jobless rate sits at 9.5% as 131,000 jobs were lost in July. We will continue to monitor Canada’s plight to restore its nations jobs in the post-recession era.