A hiring surge last month has helped to lift Canada’s employment figures to pre-pandemic levels, according to Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey for September.
The economy added 157,000 new jobs last month, far above the 60,000 expected by economists, according to a CBC News report on the figures. The national jobless rate fell to 6.9 per cent, the lowest it’s been since the beginning of the pandemic. Before COVID-19 hit, the unemployment rate was 5.6 per cent, but it ballooned to a peak of 13.7 per cent in May 2020, trending downward since then.
But not everything is back to what it was before; the number of people who are working fewer hours than they normally would is still 218,000 higher that it was in February of last year. The total number of hours worked by all employees is still 1.5 per cent lower than pre-pandemic levels, even though there are more jobs now.
At 389,000, the number of long-term unemployed – people who haven’t held a job for at least 27 weeks in a row – is double what it was before the pandemic, and accounts for more than 25 per cent of all the unemployed..
Read the CBC News report and the Statistics Canada survey.
