Statistics Canada released the Canadian employment number this morning and it is not looking good. For the month of May we lost 42,000 jobs in Canada which pushes our employment rate up 0.4% month over month to 8.4%. This the highest level of unemployment that Canada has seen in 11 years.
This is in comparison to April where the economy unexpectedly created 35,000 jobs. The April job figures were a nice surprise and gave me hope for a recovery perhaps in Q3/Q4 of this year, but after seeing the May job numbers it looks like the April increase in employment was just a blip.
As you can see from the graph below employment peaked around October of last year. Since then the Canadian economy has shed around 363,000 jobs.
Tags: Employment, Jobs
