ANALYSIS: What the Latest Unemployment Numbers Show

Canada’s unemployment rate in August rose to 6.6 percent, the highest level since May 2017, excluding the pandemic lockdown years of 2020 and 2021, Statistics Canada reports. It represented a 0.2 percentage point increase compared to July’s rate of 6.4 percent. Although the economy added 22,000 new jobs, a Sept. 6 TD Canada report said this figure was “swamped” by a population growth of 96,000 people and labour force growth of 82,500 new workers. The latest figure may be more in line with Canada’s experience in recent decades. Between 1998 and 2008, the unemployment rate ranged from a high of 8.3 percent to a low of 6.2 percent, averaging at around 7.1 percent, according to StatCan. The average over the 10-year period from 2009 to 2018 was similar, at 7.2 percent. More recently, while the rate was 5.7 percent in 2019, it rose to 9.7 percent at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Then, as the economy recovered, it fell to 7.5 percent in 2021, 5.3 percent in 2022, and 5.4 percent in 2023....