OTTAWA – Corrected July job numbers released Friday by Statistics Canada has pushed Saskatchewan’s unemployment rate down slightly.
Last week, the agency reported 500 new jobs were created in Saskatchewan during July – a number that was revised by the correction to 2,500 new jobs, all full-time positions.
That pushed the unemployment rate down to 3.2 per cent in July from the previously reported 3.3 per cent, down 0.7 percentage points from the previous month.
It is an all-time low for the province since comparable data became available in 1976.
StatsCan still says the drop in the unemployment rate is due to a decline in the number of people looking for work.
The reputation of Canada’s statistical agency took a serious blow Friday with the release of a corrected July jobs report showing the Canadian economy actually gained almost 42,000 jobs last month – nowhere near the paltry 200 it wrongly reported a week ago.
Statistics Canada blamed the botched numbers on an overhaul of its market-moving Labour Force Survey, an exercise it undertakes every 10 years.
One of the programs wasn’t updated during the redesign – a mistake the agency chalks up to human error – resulting in the number of full-time job losses being overstated.
The mistake did not change Canada’s unemployment rate, which stays at 7.0 per cent in July, down a tenth of a point from the previous month.
With files from The Canadian Press
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