By Promit Mukherjee
OTTAWA (Reuters) -Canada’s job market made a solid gain in October, reversing past declines and beating expectations, and its unemployment rate fell, data showed on Friday.
The economy added a net of 66,600 jobs in October following 60,400 job gains in the prior month, Statistics Canada said, helping offset most of the job losses recorded in July and August.
All of the gains in October were in the part-time workers category where employment rose by 85,000 people.
Full-time employment dropped by 18,500 people, StatsCan said, adding all the gain was concentrated in the private sector, a first rise since June.
The unemployment rate, which has hovered around a nine-year high outside of the pandemic, fell to 6.9% in October from 7.1% in September, it said.
Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast a jobless rate of 7.1% and had estimated that the economy would lose 2,500 jobs in October.
Canada’s economic growth potential has withered as a slew of sectoral tariffs has led to job losses in steel and automotive sectors while choking hiring in other related sectors.
This has been particularly pronounced in prospects for jobs for the youth, where the unemployment rate had peaked to a 15-year high in September.
But October marked a sharp u-turn for youth employment. Unemployment among the youth, or those aged 15 years to 24 years, slid to 14.1% last month from 14.7% in the prior month.
This was the first decline in the youth unemployment rate since February, the statistics agency noted.
Employment among the core-aged group – 25 to 54 years – which accounts for a two-thirds share of the labor force, showed a healthy increase of 38,800 jobs.
Employment numbers are usually highly volatile and are prone to sizable changes.
Among the industry groups that contributed most to the job gains were wholesale and retail, transportation and warehousing, StatsCan said.
Canada’s employment is primarily divided between the services sector and the goods sector, with four out of every five people working in the services sector.
Retail and wholesale, a part of the services sector, is the biggest employer in the country with almost 15% of the workforce employed in this industry. This sector saw a job gain of 40,700 people.
The average hourly wage of permanent employees – a gauge closely tracked by the Bank of Canada to ascertain inflationary trends – showed a spike and grew by 4.0% in October from 3.6% in September.
The healthy job numbers helped the Canadian dollar which was trading up 0.36% to 1.4065 against the U.S. dollar, or 71.10 U.S. cents. Yields on the two-year government bonds were up 4.6 basis points to 2.405%.
(Reporting by Promit Mukherjee; Editing by Dale Smith)
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