Canada’s employers are still hiring, but not enough to keep the unemployment rate from rising amid a rapidly growing population, Statistics Canada said Friday.

Experts say Canadian job seekers could be entering an “employer’s market” this spring as a slowing economy and growing labour pool means workers are losing some leverage.

StatCan said 41,000 net new jobs were added in February, driven by gains in full-time positions. The unemployment rate nonetheless ticked up 0.1 percentage points to 5.8 per cent as the labour pool continues to grow rapidly, the agency said.

That offsets a drop of the same magnitude in the unemployment rate for January. The jobless rate has held at 5.8 per cent in the three of the past four months.

StatCan said employment gains were spread across industries in the services sector in February, driven by the food and accommodations industry, which added 26,000 jobs. The professional, scientific and technical services industry also saw gains, offset by losses in education and manufacturing.

Job gains have beaten economists’ expectations for the past two months.

Dawn Desjardins, chief economist at Deloitte Canada, says that while job creation is holding stronger than expected, any strength in the labour market is being dwarfed by the swelling workforce.

“Even though those job numbers look good – healthy – we do have a lot more people trying to work and that explains why we’ve seen the unemployment rate move back up,” she tells Global News.

Pour lire la suite de l’article, cliquez ici.

Source : Global News, 8 mars 2024, By Craig Lord