Canada’s March labour market report, the first since the
country started feeling a significant impact from the coronavirus pandemic,
shows the economy shed more than one million jobs last month, Statistics Canada
said on Thursday.
Data shows the country’s employment plunged by 1,011,000, or
5.3 per cent.
The unemployment rate jumped 2.2 percentage points to 7.8
per cent, the largest one-month increase since comparable record-keeping began
in 1976. The previous record was the 125,000 jobs lost in January 2009.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged the “stark”
numbers in his daily news conference on Thursday, but said they’re “no
surprise.”
“We all knew this was going to be a tough time… but that’s
no comfort if you’re out of a job, if you’re having difficulty making ends
meet,” Trudeau said.
Once the country gets through the first wave of the virus,
the government will be able to open up the economy to a certain extent and lift
some of the restrictions in place right now, the prime minister added in
French.
Thursday’s numbers also found that of those who were still
formally employed in March, 2.1 million either worked less than half their
usual hours or didn’t work at all in the week of March 15 to 21, when
Statistics Canada collected the data.
“These 2.1 million Canadians who saw their hours
dramatically reduced could be seen as at risk of losing their job in the months
to come,” CIBC economist Royce Mendes wrote in a note to clients.
Overall, 3.1 million Canadians either lost their jobs or
were forced to work significantly less than usual, if at all, because of
COVID-19, the numbers show.
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