Canadian employment data for March 2020:

  • Worst employment report ever
  • Prior was +30.3K

Details:

  • Part time -536K vs -7.3K prior
  • Full time -474K vs +37.6K prior
  • Hourly wage rate % vs +4.3% prior
  • Unemployment rate 7.8% vs 5.6% prior
  • Participation rate 63.5% vs 65.5% prior
  • Those employed who didn't work any hours during the week: 1.3m
  • People who worked less than half of usual hours: 800K
  • Total number of Canadians who lost work or had hours reduced: 3.1m
  • "Recent labour underutilization rate" 23.0% vs 12.8% at the peak of the 2008/2009 recession
  • Total hours worked -15.1%
  • Full report

Canadian PM Trudeau announced there were more than 2 million employment claims filed so this number isn't for all the month.The survey week was March 15 to 21.

"The slowdown continued beyond the LFS reference week and is likely to be more fully reflected in April LFS data," Statistics Canada said.

The unemployment rate is also tricky to calculate:

In March, 219,000 people were not in the labour force but had worked earlier in March and still wanted a job. They were not counted as unemployed because they did not look for a job, presumably because of ongoing business shutdowns and the requirement to socially isolate. If this group were counted as unemployed, the adjusted unemployment rate would be 8.9%.