Just a few years ago, Canada was scrambling to fill a record volume of vacant jobs. Now it’s struggling to cope with the volume of excess workers. Statistics Canada (Stat Can) data shows companies added more workers to their payrolls in January. However, job vacancies fell to the lowest level since 2017, making it the worst job market in over 7 years.
Canadian Companies Added More Employees To Payrolls
First, let’s start with the good news—Canadian payrolls added more employees. Payroll employees saw seasonally adjusted monthly growth of 0.1% (+23.5k jobs), reaching 17.3 million people in January. This represents a 0.9% (+152.2k) increase compared to last year. Any growth is good news here, but less than a point isn’t enough to handle the population growth, even if we were at pre-2020 volumes.
Canadian Workers Have Seen Job Vacancies Plunge 20% Lower
Those with a job are going to want to hang on tight because there are fewer companies hiring. Seasonally adjusted monthly vacancies fell 2.5% (-13.5k jobs) to just 526.2k vacancies in January. This represents a massive 20.6% (-136.7k) drop from last year, leading to one of the worst rates in a very long time.
Canadian Job Vacancy Rate Hits The Lowest Level In Over 7 Years
The Canadian seasonally adjusted job vacancy rate.
Source: Statistics Canada.
The job vacancy rate, the share of jobs advertised as a share of total workers, plunged to a multi-year low. The seasonally adjusted rate was just 2.9% in January, down 0.1 points. This represents a 0.8-point drop from last year, meaning less than one job is available for every two unemployed workers. It works out to the lowest rate since October 2017, more than 7 years ago.
Those who think this issue only impacts the unemployed are very much mistaken. When Canada’s economy was booming just a few years ago, there was said to be an excess of jobs and not enough workers. That swings the benefit towards workers, helping to boost wages and provide upward opportunities. However, now the exact opposite is happening—the pendulum is swinging back towards employers. As a result, workers can generally expect longer job hunts, more competition, and fewer pressures driving wage growth.
We didn’t even realize how serious the tariff threats were back in January either. The tightening was mostly since the Fed was doing the hiring and they concluded they were going to cut Federal staffing. Remember the layoffs announced right before the leadership race?
I don’t know what the data is going to say since it’s so heavily manipulated these days, but rest assured we’re in for some hard times this year. Even with a speedy resolve, we played up nationalism to the point that both Canada and the US will experience tensions and normal trade won’t resume even if policymakers try to make it happen.
There’s a lot that needs explaining, like the revisions on data, the higher inflation but rate cuts, the fact Stats Can acknowledged they inflated the population but then kept using the same model?
We have no idea what’s happening. We can only go by what we feel, and they’re hoping those having a hard time think it’s just them—otherwise they would hear about it in the data which you call “junk,” but it’s important to understand that statistics aren’t facts. They’re estimates based on modeling.
Increase immigration!!!
Increase temporary foreign workers!!!
Increase international students!!
That will fix this!
Increase your skills!
Stop blaming immigrants who have a global experience and education!
Stop blaming the world and feeling entitled to a job and being a branch plant for the USA!
And more than anything stop being aggressive all the time. Nearly got hit by yet another pleb in a pickup. Everybody is angry but no one wants to take risks.
Oh yes tip top Tim Hortons experience! haha good one
does betterdwelling have a problem with correcting people who blame everything on immigration?….
What do you mean? In Vancouver they were called racist for years because they discussed the problem with money laundering (which was true). Then people said they don’t understand, immigration is the problem when there was no immigration and they reported that credit was the problem.
When an outlet is reporting essentially just a list of facts, it often reveals the personal biases of the people who are viewing it.