By Sheldon Spackman

7.6 PER CENT IN DECEMBER

Red Deer region sees jump in unemployment rate

Jan 10, 2025 | 12:13 PM

The Red Deer region saw a rise in its unemployment rate in December, coming in at 7.6 per cent, the highest rate in the province.

That’s up from 6.9 per cent in November, but down slightly from 7.9 per cent in December 2023.

According to the latest figures from Statistics Canada, Calgary saw a jobless rate of 7.2 per cent last month, while Edmonton checked in at 6.8 per cent. Wood Buffalo-Cold Lake reported an unemployment rate of 5.9 per cent in December, with Lethbridge-Medicine Hat at 5.4 per cent, Camrose-Drumheller 5.1 per cent, and Banff-Jasper-Rocky Mountain House and Athabasca-Grande Prairie-Peace River at 3.7 per cent.

Alberta’s unemployment rate was 6.6 per cent in December, down from 6.8 per cent in November but still up from 5.6 per cent in December last year.

The national jobless rate, meantime, was 6.2 per cent, up from 6.1 per cent in November and 5.3 per cent during the same month last year.

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Meantime, Mark Parsons with ATB Economics points out, employment jumped 90,900 (+0.4%) in Canada last month, mostly in full time (+57,500) positions. He notes, the employment rate—the share of the population age 15+ with a job—rose to 60.8 per cent last month.

Parsons says Alberta’s employment accelerated to end the year, rising by a blistering 35.2K and building on gains in the previous two months. This, he says, is the highest monthly gain since March 2021, during the pandemic recovery. Outside the pandemic period, Parsons says this is the largest monthly gain on record (narrowly eclipsing April 2019’s 34.9K).

Digging deeper, the report by ATB Economics indicates December job gains were entirely in full-time jobs and fairly widespread, with goods-producing industries (+11.7K) and service industries (+23.5K) both chipping in. At the more detailed industry level, Parsons says it was construction (+11.1K), food and accommodation (+8.3K), other services (7.7K) and healthcare (+6.8K) with the largest increases.

While there was a small dip (-2.1K) in forestry, mining, and oil and gas extraction (i.e. natural resource) employment, Parsons says the trend in this sector has been generally positive and corresponds to the oil production boom in the province.