Canada’s volatile jobs survey posts biggest monthly drop since 2009
OTTAWA — The vigour that carried the Canadian labour market on its impressive run in 2017 hit a speed bump to start this year with its largest one-month job drop in nine years.
The economy lost 88,000 positions — all of them part time — in January for its biggest employment decline in a single month since 2009, Statistics Canada’s latest jobs survey revealed Friday.
The dip helped push the national unemployment rate up to 5.9 per cent, from a revised 5.8 per cent the previous month.
The decrease was driven by the loss of 137,000 part-time positions, including more than 59,000 in Ontario. It was the biggest one-month collapse in part-time work since the agency started gathering the data in 1976.