Monday, February 15, 2016

Ontario and Canada January 2016 Jobs Numbers

I've been meaning to get around to covering the Statscan employment report for January. The tl;dr is Canada poor Ontario good. Although I think there's more to it than that.

Canada overall lost 5,700 jobs, with Alberta losing 10,000 which is a large number for one month for a province the size of Alberta.

Ontario on the other hand Ontario gained 19,800 jobs which is impressive. Full-time jobs were up 16,300 while part-time jobs were up 3,600. What I wonder is how many of those full-time jobs were people declaring themselves self-employed and full-time. That often isn't the sign of a strong economy. Year over year, in Ontario jobs were up 100,200 which is reasonably, although not amazing given population growth. Full-time jobs however were up 180,600 while part-time jobs were down 80,400. I wonder if over the year, people declaring themselves self-employed was a factor for the full-time job growth. Potentially though the rapid fall of the dollar could be resulting in companies increasing their demand for labour and moving people from part to full-time hours. Overall in Canada, employee jobs increased by 89,400 while self-employed jobs increased by 36,200 jobs. I'm surmising that some of those jobs were in Ontario.

February's numbers should also be interesting. One would expect Alberta to continue to shed private sector jobs as oil hovers around US$ 30 per barrel and Ontario to pick up jobs due to the low dollar

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