Some good and bad news for Edmonton in latest jobs report

“The number of people sort of sitting on the sidelines, discouraged by the difficult employment conditions in late 2016, they’re going to move back into the labour force. So while we’re going to see very good employment gains over the remainder of 2017, the unemployment rate is not going to come down a whole lot.”

Rose added there was a little bit of good news in the numbers.

“We did see some solid gains in full-time employment, but they weren’t large enough to offset those part-time job losses. The full-time gains were in manufacturing, which is very encouraging because our manufacturing sector had taken a real big hit in 2016.”

Provincially, Alberta added 7,500 jobs last month, all of them part-time. However, that is made up of 18,000 part-time jobs gained and 11,000 full-time ones lost. Year-over-year is more positive, with a gain of 48,000 jobs, almost all of them full-time. The jobless rate also went down by 0.4 per cent to 7.4 per cent.

Perhaps Edmonton can take some small comfort in the fact that its unemployment rate is still better than Calgary’s at 8.9 per cent.

“While by historical standards, the unemployment rate in Edmonton is high, we didn’t take anywhere near the hit that Calgary did. They’ve got a long way to go in Calgary before they recover fully from what happened to them.”

Across the country, it was good news as 45,000 jobs were added, about four times what analysts expected. Unemployment also fell a tenth to 6.5 per cent.