Quebec lost approximately 450,000 jobs in about four months from March to June compared to the same period in 2019 due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Institut de la statistique du Québec said this is a drop of about 10 per cent in the total volume of employment, which amounted, on average from March to June of last year, to about 4.33 million jobs.
From March to June 2020, just over 365,000 jobs were lost in the service industry. The institute estimates that the accommodation and food services industry has seen a decline of nearly 100,000 jobs, while in wholesale and retail trade, the loss of jobs would be around 75,000.
“The young people are working in partial time and they’re working in the industries that we see a very big loss. The half of the job loss is due to the people age 25 to 34,” says Luc Cloutier-Villeneuve, Institut de la statistique du Quebec.
The manufacturing industry is estimated to have suffered a loss of nearly 50,000 jobs.
Retailers and restauranteurs agree the number of jobs is slowly increasing, but capacity restrictions are preventing businesses from hiring more staff.
“Forty-thousand jobs were recovered in our industry, but only 40,000 jobs. Mainly with the new sanitary measures, restaurants are opening with a limited capacity so we don’t need all the help that we usually have,” said Martin Vezina, Quebec Restaurant Association spokesman.
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“What we are seeing now is people coming back to work but there is a couple of issues though, because if you are a retail (outlet) you don’t have the full traffic yet,” says Marc Fortin, the Retail Council of Canada’s Quebec president.
The institute’s findings, based on data from Statistics Canada’s Labor Force Survey, indicate more women seem to have lost jobs than men during the COVID-19 crisis compared to the same period last year. Compared to 2019, there were 238,100 job losses for women and 209,100 jobs lost for men.
Young people aged 15 to 24 were proportionally more affected than other age groups. There was a nearly 25 per cent drop in their employment, or a loss of 132,300 jobs, from March to June.
Last week, Statistics Canada indicated that in Quebec, employment increased by 2.4 per cent last month — an increase on top of those observed during the previous two months and which brought employment to 94.4 per cent of its level observed before the coronavirus crisis.
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“Now we clean everything, we have sanitizer at the door, we have to have doormen at the door to manage the amount of people coming in, all these positons are being created,” Fortin told Global News.
Retailers and restaurateurs fear that if things do not get better, more businesses will continue to close, causing the job loss numbers to rise even more.
“Right now we are not getting enough government support and if not anything changes, they feel like they can only be open for another six months,” says Vezina.
But he’s optimistic that Quebec businesses will continue to innovate in order to create jobs and increase revenues.
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