Job growth lost momentum in October amid ‘tug of war’ between secure and pandemic-hobbled industries
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Employment increased in five provinces — Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland — while the rest of the provinces remained steady, StatCan reported.
The gains over the past few months suggested the country had recouped many of the jobs lost at the outset of the pandemic. In October, Canada was 3.3 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of employment.
Hours of work increased by 0.8 per cent, outpacing overall employment growth which went up half a per cent from September. For the first time since the economic shutdowns, the number of self-employed Canadians rose (1.2 per cent).
With the rise in COVID-19 cases across the country reaching record levels in October, more Canadians also began to work from home — approximately 150,000.
Alexander, however, pointed out that we are now seeing some of the long-range consequences of a government-triggered economic shutdown.
Long-term unemployment, which Statistics Canada defines as being jobless for longer than 27 weeks, rose more than 50 per cent in October from September, with 151,000 people who lost jobs in March and April remaining unemployed since then.
“We are now seeing more economic scars from the recession,” Alexander told the Post.
The overall positive gains the country has seen since emerging from lockdown may not last, some economists warn. What was great “leaps and bounds early on are now baby steps,” Sri Thanabalasingam, senior economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank wrote.
Douglas Porter, the chief economist at Bank of Montreal, warned that jobs gains will be “increasingly tough to come by, especially in the face of renewed restrictions in many provinces.”
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