StatCan to release snapshot of Canada’s labour force in March amid COVID-19

UPDATE: StatsCan reports that Canada lost 1 million jobs last month. Read more.

Canada’s national statistics agency is set this morning to release a snapshot of the labour force from March as the COVID-19 virus plunged the country into economic uncertainty.

The report will provide a picture of employment for the third week in March just as companies began closing shop and laying off staff to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus disease.

Statistics Canada says it has retooled some of its usual measures to better gauge the effects of COVID-19 on the job market because its traditional definitions of employed, unemployed and not in the labour force “may not fully capture some aspects of the impact” from the pandemic.

The survey, for example, will exclude the more commonly observed reasons for absent workers — such as vacation, weather, parental leave or a strike or lockout — to better isolate the pandemic’s effect.

Still, there is a general expectation that the figures will show massive losses and a large spike in the national unemployment rate.

BMO chief economist Douglas Porter wrote in a note last week that his team was predicting 600,000 jobs lost in March, which would be five times higher than the worst single-month drop in the survey’s history, recorded in January 2009.

Miles Corak, who was once the in-house economist at Employment and Social Development Canada, predicted in an online post that the national unemployment rate would increase from 5.6 per cent in February to 10 per cent in March.

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The last time the labour force survey captured a double-digit unemployment rate was in 1994, a review of monthly unemployment rates from Statistics Canada going back to 1976 shows.

RBC senior economists Nathan Janzen and Josh Nye forecast a 10-per-cent unemployment rate for March, which would indicate a loss of one million jobs.

Their pair said in a research note that with millions more applying for federal aid — almost one million people applied on Monday for an emergency benefit, roughly what the EI program sees in a six-month period — the national unemployment rate was now potentially north of 15 per cent.

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The highest monthly unemployment rate the labour force survey has recorded since 1976 was 13.1 per cent in December 1982.

“The bad news is that the reading for April is going to be even worse than these (March) numbers,” CIBC senior economist Royce Mendes wrote last week, forecasting a drop of 250,000 jobs in March.

“The good news is that a large fiscal stimulus package has been directed to support many individuals that are no longer employed.”