Employment and unemployment

Description: This dashboard displays small area estimates of unemployment rate, employment rate and employment for census metropolitan areas, census agglomerations, and a complementary geography of small communities and rural areas called self-contained labour areas. The dashboard allows users to visually explore the estimates using an interactive map as well as time series charts and tables. Data are unadjusted for seasonality and updated monthly.

Description: This document briefly describes the small area estimation methodology developed to produce monthly estimates of employment and unemployment rate for census metropolitan areas, census agglomerations, and self-contained labour areas using data from the Labour Force Survey, Employment Insurance statistics and population projections.

Description: Small area estimates of unemployment rate, employment rate and number of employed persons for census metropolitan areas, census agglomerations and self-contained labour areas. Data are unadjusted for seasonality and updated monthly.

Description: Historical releases of employment and average weekly earnings (including overtime) for all employees by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), last 5 months.

Description: Historical releases of employment and average weekly earnings (including overtime) for all employees by province, territory and North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), last 5 months.

Description: Using data from the Labour Force Survey, this study assesses the degree to which employment and hourly wage rates of unpartnered mothers with young children have caught up to their partnered peers between 1997 and 2023. Focusing on mothers aged 18 to 49 with at least one child aged 5 or younger, the analysis examines differences between partnered (i.e., currently married or living common law) and unpartnered mothers, with disaggregation by unpartnered mothers who have never been married and those who were previously married. The study also examines employment and wage gaps by various diverse groups, such as the experiences of immigrant mothers, as well as Indigenous mothers.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: This infographic uses data from the Labour Force Survey to look at trends in employment and wage among mothers with young children (age 5 and under). Special attention is paid to differences based on partnership status of mothers.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: This web application provides access to Statistics Canada’s Labour Market Indicators for Canada, by province and by census metropolitan area. This dynamic application allows users to view geographical rankings for each labour market indicator and to create quick and easy reports with interactive maps and charts that can be easily copied into other programs. All provincial and CMA estimates used in this application are seasonally adjusted, 3-month moving averages. Labour Force Survey data at the provincial level published each month in The Daily are seasonally adjusted monthly estimates.

Description: This dashboard displays small area estimates of unemployment rate, employment rate and employment for census metropolitan areas, census agglomerations, and a complementary geography of small communities and rural areas called self-contained labour areas. The dashboard allows users to visually explore the estimates using an interactive map as well as time series charts and tables. Data are unadjusted for seasonality and updated monthly.

Description: Small area estimates of unemployment rate, employment rate and number of employed persons for census metropolitan areas, census agglomerations and self-contained labour areas. Data are unadjusted for seasonality and updated monthly.

Description: Historical releases of employment and average weekly earnings (including overtime) for all employees by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), last 5 months.

Description: Historical releases of employment and average weekly earnings (including overtime) for all employees by province, territory and North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), last 5 months.

Description: This web application provides access to Statistics Canada’s Labour Market Indicators for Canada, by province and by census metropolitan area. This dynamic application allows users to view geographical rankings for each labour market indicator and to create quick and easy reports with interactive maps and charts that can be easily copied into other programs. All provincial and CMA estimates used in this application are seasonally adjusted, 3-month moving averages. Labour Force Survey data at the provincial level published each month in The Daily are seasonally adjusted monthly estimates.

Description: This web application provides access to Statistics Canada’s Labour Market Indicators for Canada, by province, territory and economic region (ER). This dynamic application allows users to view a snapshot of key labour market indicators, observe geographical rankings for each indicator using an interactive map and table, and easily copy data into other programs. The provincial and ER estimates used in this application from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) are three-month moving averages, unadjusted for seasonality. The provincial, territorial and ER estimates used in this application from the Job Vacancy and Wage Survey (JVWS) are quarterly data, unadjusted for seasonality. Historical estimates are available in this application, with data going back 10 years for the LFS and from the first quarter of 2016 for JVWS.

Description:

This interactive visualization application provides a comprehensive picture of the Canadian labour market using the most recent Labour Force Survey data available. The estimates are seasonally adjusted and available by province, sex, age group and industry. Historical estimates, going back 5 years, are also included for monthly employment changes and unemployment rates. The interactive application allows users to quickly and easily explore and personalize the information presented. Combine multiple provinces, sexes and age groups to create your own labour market domains of interest.

Description:

The Canadian Labour Market Observatory consists of interactive data visualization applications showcasing the vast amount of publicly available labour market information. The fully interactive applications allow Canadians to quickly and easily personalize the information in a way that is relevant to them and their interests.

Description: This public use microdata file (PUMF) contains non-aggregated data for a wide variety of variables collected from the Labour Force Survey (LFS). The LFS collects monthly information on the labour market activities of Canada's working age population. This product is for users who prefer to do their own analysis by focusing on specific subgroups in the population or by cross-classifying variables that are not in our catalogued products.

Monthly files are available back to 2006 and can be directly downloaded. For reference periods prior to 2006, files are available by request through Statistics Canada's Electronic File Transfer (EFT) service and date back to 1976.

Description: Number of persons in the labour force (employment and unemployment) and not in the labour force, unemployment rate, participation rate, and employment rate, by sex and detailed age group, last 5 months.

Description:

This paper reviews the increase in the earnings gap between immigrants and Canadian-born over the past two decades, and the current explanations of this labour market deterioration among recent immigrants in particular. The paper also outlines the rising gap in low-income rates between immigrants and non-immigrants. Like previous research, the paper concludes that the earnings gap at entry has increased for immigrants entering Canada during the 1990s, as compared to those of the 1970s. Furthermore, the gap in the low-income rate has been increasing. The rate of low income has been rising among immigrants (particularly recent immigrants) during the 1990s, while falling among the Canadian-born. The rise in low-income rates among immigrants was widespread, affecting immigrants in all education groups, age groups, and from most source countries (except the "traditional source regions"). Immigrants with university degrees were not excluded from this rise in low-income rates, in spite of the discussion regarding the rising demand for more highly-skilled workers in Canada. As a result of both rising low-income rates among immigrants, and their increasing share of the population, in Canada's major cities virtually all of the increase in the city low-income rates during the 1990s was concentrated among the immigrant population.

Also reviewed here are the explanations discussed in the literature for the deterioration of immigrant economic outcomes. Three major sources are identified as being empirically important, all of which follow from declining labour market outcomes. First, the change in the characteristics of immigrants (e.g., from different source regions, rising levels of educational attainment, etc.) appears to have accounted for about one-third of the increase in the earnings gap at entry (i.e., the gap between immigrants and comparable Canadian-born). Second, decreasing economic returns to foreign work experience appears to play an equally large role. Third, there has been a general decline in the labour market outcomes of all new entrants to the Canadian labour market, and when new immigrants arrive in Canada they, regardless of age, appear to face a similar phenomenon. Other possible explanations are also discussed. Importantly, one potential factor that does not appear to be behind the decline is a reduction in the economic return to education. Immigrants, on average, do have a somewhat lower return to education obtained prior to immigrating (although not to education obtained once in Canada), but this has not changed much over the past two decades.

Description:

This paper uses firm-level data from the T2/LEAP to investigate whether the link between tariff changes and employment differed across firms with various productivity and leverage characteristics over the period 1988 to 1994. The results suggest that the combined effect of domestic and U.S. tariff reductions on employment was typically small, but that losses were significantly larger for firms which were less productive. For instance, firms with average productivity in 1988 responded to tariff changes by cutting employment by only 3.6% over the period 1988 to 1994, while lower productivity firms typically shed 15.1% of their workforce over the same period. This paper also indicates that firms which were more heavily in debt downsized more in response to declining domestic tariffs, suggesting that financial constrains became more binding when tariff cuts were implemented. These results suggest that firms with high productivity and low leverage were less likely than others to feel the impact of declining U.S. and domestic tariffs.

Description:

This article summarizes findings from the research paper entitled: Tariff Reduction and Employment in Canadian Manufacturing, 1988-1994. At the end of the 1980s, Canada and the United States reached an agreement to phase out import tariffs over a 10-year period beginning January 1st, 1989. This tariff reduction scheme was a major centre-piece of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA). The implementation of the FTA was followed by a recession, characterized by massive job cuts in manufacturing industries, which led to suggestions that employment losses were related to the reduction of trade barriers. Research on firm output and survival (Gu, Sawchuk and Whewell, 2003; Baggs, 2004) suggests the impact of tariff changes was different across industries and across firms within industries. Using firm-level data, this study investigates the impact of reduced Canadian and U.S. tariffs on Canadian manufacturing employment. The study also asks whether the impact was heterogeneous across firms with various productivity and leverage characteristics.

Description:

Call centres are believed to be largely responsible for the phenomenal growth of the business support services industry over the past two decades. The Labour Force Survey is used to profile call-centre workers and to substantiate or disprove some commonly held perceptions.

Description:

This article investigates factors influencing the chances of find a job for people who were unemployed for more than six months in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Results for the short-term jobless are included for comparison.

Description:

This paper provides information on Aboriginal employment and unemployment, Aboriginal youths and the impact of education on labour market performance in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. Annual average data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) on off-reserve Aboriginal peoples from April 2004 to March 2005 are used.

Description:

This article estimates and analyses the economic impact of the culture sector on the economy of Canada's provinces. It measures the contribution of the culture sector to provincial employment and gross domestic product (GDP).

Description:

Job growth has shifted from high tech and autos in the 1990s to housing, resources and retailing so far this decade. This change in demand has profound implications for where jobs are located and the type of occupational and educational skills required. Meanwhile, labour supply has been increasingly met by older workers, as the population ages and formerly slow-growth industries no longer push workers out of the labour force.

Description:

Self-employment is more common in rural than urban Canada. In 2001, about one in four workers in rural areas, villages and small towns earned at least some of their income from self-employment, compared with only one in six in Canada as a whole. Of course, farming is a key element explaining high self-employment rates in rural and small town Canada. But although farm self-employment remains a key source of income and employment for many, its importance has declined and self-employment activity on the non-farm side has been increasing rapidly.

The forces driving self-employment in smaller labour markets may be complex, but there is no doubt that entrepreneurship is thriving in rural Canada, despite the waning importance of farm self-employment. This article uses data from the Census of Population to describe non-farm self-employment among workers aged 20 to 64 living in Canada's rural areas and small towns.

Description:

This paper examines the effect of ethnic neighbourhoods on wage growth as well as other labour market outcomes of immigrant men in Canada using the 1981, 1986, 1991 and 1996 Censuses. While the primary measure of affiliation is country of birth, ethnicity, language and visible minority status are also examined to determine the robustness of the findings. Consistent with U.S. findings, ethnic neighbourhoods based on country of birth are found to have a negative impact on the ten-year wage growth of immigrants. Further, the model for wage growth is found to be robust to different lengths of time and different base years as well as the specification of language and ethnicity as the affiliation grouping. Using country of birth as the affiliation index, exposure is also found to have a negative impact on the growth of total and weekly earnings as well as the initial wages of entry cohorts. While little evidence is found on the effects of ethnic neighbourhoods on changes in employment, a negative effect of exposure is found on entry employment rates of the most recent landing cohorts. Although the overall effect of ethnic neighbourhoods on wage growth is negative, ethnic neighbourhoods are found to have a divergent effect on different landing cohorts, having a positive impact on the wage growth of the more recent cohorts and a negative impact on earlier cohorts.

Description:

This report contains basic conceptual and data quality information intended to facilitate the use and interpretation of census industry data. It provides an overview of the industry processing cycle, including elements such as regional processing, edit and imputation, and the tabulation of error rates. Notable changes in the industrial classification structure are discussed as well as differences in the coding procedures from the previous census (1996). The report concludes with summary tables that indicate the level of data quality in the 2001 Census industry data.

Description:

The Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) is a longitudinal survey designed to provide policy-relevant information about school-work transitions and factors influencing pathways. YITS will provide vehicle for future research and analysis of major transitions in young people's lives, particularly those between education, training and work. Information obtained from, and research based on, the survey will help clarify the nature and causes of short and long-term challenges young people face in school-work transitions and support policy planning and decision making to help prevent or remedy these problems.

Objectives of the Youth in Transition Survey were developed after an extensive consultation with stakeholders with an interest in youth and school-work transitions. Content includes measurement of major transitions in young people's lives including virtually all formal educational experiences and most labour-market experiences. Factors influencing transitions are also included family background, school experiences, achievement, aspirations and expectations, and employment experiences.

The implementation plan encompasses a longitudinal survey for each of two age cohorts, to be surveyed every two years. Data from a cohort entering at age 15 will permit analysis of long-term school-work transition patterns. Data from a cohort entering at ages18-20 will provide more immediate, policy-relevant information on young adults in the labour market.

Cycle one for the cohort aged 15 will include information collected from youth, their parents, and school principals. The sample design is a school-based frame that allows the selection of schools, and then individuals within schools. This design will permit analysis of school effects, a research domain not currently addressed by other Statistics Canada surveys. Methods of data collection include a self-completed questionnaire for youth and school principals, a telephone interview with parents, and assessment of youth competency in reading, science and mathematics as using self-completed test booklets provided under the integration of YITS with the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). A pilot survey was conducted in April 1999 and the main survey took place in April-May 2000. Interviews were conducted with 30,000 students aged 15 from 1,000 schools in Canada. A telephone interview with parents of selected students took place in June 2000.

The sample design for the cohort aged 18-20 is similar to that of the Labour-Force survey. The method of data collection is computer-assisted telephone interviewing. The pilot survey was conducted in January 1999. In January-February 2000, 23, 000 youth participated in the main survey data collection.

Data from both cohorts is expected to be available in 2001. Following release of the first international report by the OECD/PISA project and the first national report, data will be publically available, permitting detailed exploration of content themes.

Description:

This paper examines a new variable which would show whether a person's job is related to his or her postsecondary education. This variable would help to explain other characteristics measured in the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID), such as wages, supervisory roles, and job stability.

Description:

The employment/population ratio is a good barometer of the state of the economy and an important though little-used labour market indicator. This article takes a look at the ratio's strengths and limitations, as well as its variation since 1946. Provincial and international comparisons are included.

Description:

This paper presents an analysis of the questions in the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) relating to supervision and management. It uses data collected in January 1993.

Description:

This paper examines the robustness of a measure of the average complete duration of unemployment in Canada to a host of assumptions used in its derivation. In contrast to the average incomplete duration of unemployment, which is a lagging cyclical indicator, this statistic is a coincident indicator of the business cycle. The impact of using a steady state as opposed to a non steady state assumption, as well as the impact of various corrections for response bias are explored. It is concluded that a non steady state estimator would be a valuable compliment to the statistics on unemployment duration that are currently released by many statistical agencies, and particularly Statistics Canada.

Description:

The Standard Occupational Classification provides a systematic classification structure to identify and categorize the entire range of occupational activity in Canada. This up-to-date classification is based upon, and easily related to, the National Occupational Classification. It consists of 10 broad occupational categories which are subdivided into major groups, minor groups and unit groups. Definitions and occupational titles are provided for each unit group. An alphabetical index of the occupational titles classified to the unit group level is also included.

Description:

This study illustrates quarterly trends in unemployment rates based on alternative measures. By all of the indicators studies there was an overall increase in unemployment during the early 1990s.

Description: The objective of this program is to provide data on employment (number of employees, wages and salaries) in the public sector, i.e. the federal, provincial, territorial and local general governments, health and social service institutions, universities, colleges, vocational and trade institutions, school boards, and government business enterprises.

Description: This survey is an establishment census survey designed to gather data on employment, payrolls and paid-hours from larger employers (companies or establishments of 20 or more employees).