Details for the month of September:
- Employment change: -68.3K vs +9.2K expected; prior -41.7K
- Unemployment rate: 6.5% vs 6.5% expected; prior 6.4%
- Full-time employment change: -35.4K vs prior -35.9K
- Part-time employment change: -32.9K vs prior +5.8K
- Participation rate: 64.8% vs prior 65.0%
- Average hourly wages for permanent employees: +2.3% YoY vs +2.0% prior
The US-Canada trade war picked up in September and it looks like it bit into the economy, with a second consecutive month of large job losses that now totals -110K. The unemployment rate held steady but only because of a 0.2 percentage point drop in the participation rate. Worse still, the wage pressures rose in a move that will make the Bank of Canada uncomfortable.
USD/CAD traded at 1.4232 ahead of the data and shot to 1.4293 afterwards.
Digging into the report, it paints an ugly picture of Canadian youth (who paid the price for covid) and are now paying it again in the jobs market.
If there’s a silver lining in this report it’s that public sector employees fell 70.0K while private sector employees rose 24.1k (self-employment was -22.5K). Educational services employment fell 35.3K at a time of where where seasonal adjustments are notoriously difficult. The decline was also focused in Quebec, which lost nearly 50K jobs.
On the youth side, we also saw a fall of 48.1K jobs but with the labor force falling by 50K jobs. These kids left the labour force rather than showing up as unemployed. That’s consistent with back-to-school timing and seasonal-adjustment quirks, not mass firing. And as bad as the 12.9% youth unemployment rate is, that’s still 1.6 pp better than a year ago.
The other big loser was healthcare, with jobs down 23.1K int he first drop in nearly four years.
