It will be interesting to see how this affects the housing market. For years now many have said that Canada’s housing market will be just fine so long as other sectors are there to support it. Now one of those sectors – employment – may not be, after some fairly startling statistics were revealed last week.
It was announced by Statistics Canada on Friday that the country lost 54,500 jobs in the month of March – a drastic drop in employment that just about wipes out any other positive gains in the employment sector made over the past six months. It’s also well below the 6,500 new jobs that economists had forecasted we were to expect in the same month.
This means that our jobless rate has increased to 7.2 per cent in March, compared with the 7 per cent where it sat in February. It also means that the jobless rate is back up to the highest levels it’s been at since November of last year.
“Canada’s good news job story was erased in a single month,” says Avery Shenfeld, chief economist at CIBC World Markets.
Most provinces saw job losses, but those that were the hardest hit were Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario. Other provinces had little to no change, while Nova Scotia was the only province that saw any increase in employment during the month of March.
Private sector employees were hardest hit, with 85,400 fewer employees reporting to work; while the public sector saw very little change. Obviously knowing that they had to set out on their own path, a total of 38,700 people made the move to self-employment during the same month.
And everyone was hit by the sudden drop, with the youth jobless rate also moving up to 14.2 per cent from the 13.6 per cent where it was.
Of course, there were many things that attributed to such a significant increase in our jobless and unemployment rate. However, the firing of workers at RBC, all so that those Canadians can be replaced by foreign workers, was definitely one of the reasons. We’ll have a look at that very hot topic a little later today.
