Local economy loses 17,200 jobs in March

Give the folks at Statistics Canada credit. They tried very hard to provide proper context for their March jobs survey.

The canvass of 56,000 households across the country was done between March 15 and 21, which captured the very early stage of the job market carnage triggered by COVID -19.

On this basis, the government agency on Thursday reported the national unemployment had jumped to 7.8 per cent in March compared to 5.6 per cent in February. Not only was StatsCan careful to point out the likelihood of a further sharp deterioration in April, it also explained why the March headline numbers vastly underestimated the pain being experienced in the workforce.

When StatsCan tallied the number of unemployed, recently employed but not looking for working and those earning less than half their previous wages, it calculated 23 per cent of the country’s workforce was effectively jobless or nearly so, what the agency calls “the recent labour underutilization rate.”

A more comprehensive picture of how COVID-19 has crashed through our labour markets will emerge from Statcan’s mid-April survey, published early in May.

This is important context for the agency’s employment estimate for the national capital region, where the seasonally adjusted jobless rate jumped to 5.1 per cent in March from 4.3 per cent in February as the local economy shed 17,200 jobs.

Nearly 90 per cent of the job loss was in Ottawa, which accounts for 76 per cent of the region’s population. The region’s labour force shrank by 11,600.