The Jobs Numbers for March

I’m struck by the extent to which the media stuck to the story of  a dismal US economy/resilient Canadian economy in reporting on Friday’s labour force numbers. See eg the Saturday Globe and Mail report. In fact,  Quebec and Ontario combined lost 47,000 full-time jobs in March, and the Maritime provinces also showed signs of growing weakness. Almost all of the job gains were in BC and Alberta.  It was only strong growth of part-time jobs (up 34,000) which kept the unemployment rate from rising more than it did.  Central Canada seems to be suffering from the US downturn at least as much as most of the US.

One comment

  • I must admit it was one of the more blantant misreporting of the LFS numbers I have seen in awhile. There was a huge issue in the States with losing 80K jobs in their last report, and this on an employed labour force 10 times the size that we have. We lose 47K full time jobs in our industrial heartland and the only thing reported is the robustness of the economy. If the unemployment rate would have dropped by the same amount that it increased this month, we would have had headlines praising the economy to no end.

    I don’t get what is up with our media these days. Although I have to say that even the Statcan official release seemed overly biased and could be construed as flag waving for the tories. Come on Ivan F., lets have some neutrality here in the reporting of the facts.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *