Canadian employment report for April 2020:

  • Worst report ever
  • Prior was -1010.7K
  • Unemployment rate 13.0% vs 18.1% expected
  • Prior was 7.8%
  • Full time -1472K vs -474K prior
  • Part time -521K vs -536K prior
  • Participation rate 59.8% vs 61.4% exp
  • Prior participation rate 63.5%
  • 97% of those newly unemployed expected to return to former job once shutdown relaxed
  • Full report

The headline is much better than expected but when you drill down into the numbers, there are so many caveats and they all paint a darker picture. More than one-third (36.7%) of the potential labour force did not work or worked less than half of their usual hours compared to 11.3% in Feb before the pandemic and 12.8% at the peak of the 2008/09 recession.

The number of people who were employed but worked less than half of their usual hours for reasons related to COVID-19 increased by 2.5 million from February to April.

Self-employed people were little-changed at 2.0m but 1.2m of them worked less than half the number of hours and 38.4% worked no hours.

As of the week of April 12, the cumulative effect of the COVID-19 economic shutdown-the number of Canadians who were either not employed or working substantially reduced hours-was 5.5 million, or more than one-quarter of February's employment level.

The April unemployment rate would be 17.8%, when adjusted to reflect those who were not counted as unemployed for reasons specific to the COVID-19 economic shutdown.

The number of solo

Separately, Canadian building permits fell 13.2% in March compared to 20.0% expected.