Nearly 20,000 people may have lost their jobs in April, according to the volatile Labour Force Survey (LFS), a slightly worse number than some economists had predicted.
Each month, Statistics Canada releases a statistical portrait of how the country’s economy fared in terms of jobs the month before.
How do they calculate it?
Well, they ask people. Statistics Canada conducts a household survey about halfway through each month (whichever week has the 15th day in it) and asks people who are at least 15 years old in 54,000 households questions about their employment.
They use that to determine, based on the sample, a picture of what happened in the labour market that month.
How can there be no change?
So as the country lost 19,700 jobs in April – the unemployment rate stayed the same. How is that possible? The Labour Force Survey only includes people actively looking for work. Retired? Student? Simply given up? You’re not included as unemployed.
“Those types of people, they’re not unemployed, because their labour force is not going untapped,” Andrew Fields, a labour market analyst at Statistics Canada said in an interview.
But Statistics Canada does keep track of what it calls “discouraged workers” – or those who’ve given up looking for work. The numbers that came out on Friday don’t take these workers in to account.
READ MORE: Target closures, oil shock see 20,000 jobs evaporate in April
That number in April was 7.3 per cent – but Fields says it’s not fair to compare that number to the LFS unemployment rate of 6.8 because the former isn’t seasonally adjusted.
The annual unemployment rate, including discouraged workers, was 7 per cent in 2014, just a tick more than the official 6.9 per cent.
April not all that great
“The numbers came in slightly weaker than expected; we had 20,000 losses of jobs in April,” Jonathan Bendiner, an economist with TD Economics said in an interview Friday.
“On a trend basis, we’re looking at around 3,000 jobs per month gain, which is relatively weak.”
The unemployment rate fluctuates each month, with some people gaining jobs, others losing them, and other sectors having a bad quarter or a good season. So economists tend to look at trends rather than headline-grabbing monthly numbers.
“It can be volatile on a month-over-month basis, so that’s why, again, we look at the trend rate of growth,” Bendiner said.
And over the past year, Canada has added 139,000 jobs, a small tick upwards of just 0.8 per cent.
Though there were some bright spots last month, Bendiner said, there were more private sector jobs and more full-time jobs.
“If you look at Alberta for example, they’re a resource-rich province and given the drop in oil prices, you’d expect to see job growth to be weak, but it continues to generate jobs as it did this month,” Bendiner said.
But he doesn’t expect that to continue. One of the problems with the LFS is that it provides what’s called a “lagging indicator” – or a snapshot of what’s already happened. It doesn’t predict anything.
“So we don’t expect to see this kind of strength in resource-based regions like Alberta to hold over the rest of the year, so expect to see weakness in the job market in regions like Alberta, Saskatchewan, as the year unfolds.”
But to Mike Moffatt, an economist with the Mowat Centre and the Ivey School of Business, April’s numbers don’t add up.
“They don’t make any sense to put it mildly,” he said in an interview Friday.
The headline number – 19,700 jobs lost – isn’t out of whack, Moffatt said. Instead, it’s the municipal numbers which don’t seem to add up.
“According to the numbers, Halifax and Kitchener both had their worst months ever in terms of job growths, Vancouver had one of its worst months ever, London had one of its worst months ever,” he said.
But who cares about municipal numbers if the unemployment rate is holding steady or falling?
“I know a lot of people don’t really care about the municipal level, but if these things don’t add up at the municipal level, then I’m not sure how much we can trust the country-level data.”
While Statistics Canada said it stands by its numbers, Moffatt suggested Friday the numbers will likely be revised in a couple of months.
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