Looking for a job?
Employers in British Columbia are looking for people to fill them, numbers released today by Statistics Canada show.
B.C. had Canada’s highest job vacancy rate – 2.8 per cent – in the last quarter of 2015, followed by the Northwest Territories.
Perhaps unexpectedly, Alberta had the second-highest job vacancy rate among provinces, at 2.5 per cent.
READ MORE: As oil patch sheds jobs, unemployment claims rise steadily in Saskatchewan, Alberta
Regionally, Banff-Jasper-Rocky Mountain House, Alta., had the country’s highest job vacancy rate, followed by the B.C. Lower Mainland and northeast B.C.
(Wood Buffalo, the region corresponding to Alberta’s oilpatch centred on Fort McMurray, had a job vacancy rate of only 1.6 per cent, barely above Cape Breton, and below several regions in Atlantic Canada.)
Employers offered higher wages in the N.W.T and in northern parts of provinces, StatsCan reported. Canada’s highest hourly wage, $26.50, was offered in northern Saskatchewan.
READ MORE: Alberta’s economy doing worse than expected, TD report warns
Last week, StatsCan reported that B.C. had Canada’s lowest unemployment rate, at 5.8 per cent. B.C. gained 13,000 jobs in April, even as hard-hit Alberta lost 21,000.
And on Wednesday, a report from BMO pointed out that Vancouver and Toronto had accounted for all of Canada’s job growth over the last year.
In April, a report from TD Economics said that people displaced by the crashing energy sector in Alberta and Saskatchewan had been migrating to British Columbia.
READ MORE: Vancouver, Toronto accounted for all job growth in Canada last year: BMO