- There were roughly 2 million fewer Canadians at work in April, bringing the cumulative losses since February to 3 million. The employment rate dropped to 52.1%, a level never before seen in the current measurement system (starting from 1976). The unemployment rate rose by 5.2 points to hit 13.0%.
- Perhaps more telling than the sheer number of job losses is the impact on hours worked. Employment fell 11%, but hours worked were down an even larger 14.9%. This suggests that not only were less Canadians working, but many more were working less. This was confirmed by Statistics Canada’s report that in addition to the headline figure, there were also 2.5 million Canadians that worked less than half their usual hours last month as a result of COVID-19.
- The losses were again by and large in private sector employment (-1.87 million). By comparison, self-employment was little changed (-43.1k), as was public sector employment (-76.8k). Losses were largely among service sector workers (-1.4 million), although construction and manufacturing both saw sizeable drops as well. No province was immune from the losses, with the largest drops seen in the largest provinces: Ontario shed 690k jobs, Quebec 560k, B.C. 260k, and employment in Alberta was down 240k net positions.
- The job losses were fairly spread out across other characteristics: since February, roughly the same number of men and women have lost work. Job losses have been fairly evenly distributed across age groups, although younger Canadians (aged 15-24) who normally make up about 13% of employment have been disproportionately hit, bearing 30% of the job losses to date.
- As was the case in March, the pandemic has made interpreting data more challenging – if you lost your job but didn’t look for one because of the pandemic, you are not considered unemployed for the purposes of this survey. There were 1.1 million such people in April, and classifying them as unemployed would have meant a reported unemployment rate of 17.8%
- Statistics Canada also noted that there were 5.8 million people who did not work but could reasonably be expected to return – either still employed but with no hours worked, or on temporary layoff, meaning they expect to be able to return to their job in the next six months.
Key Implications
- One in seven. That’s roughly how many Canadians lost their job on net since February. One in four is how many either lost their job, or most/all of their hours. The scale of the needed pandemic response has been such that odds are that most of us know at least one, if not several people who’ve had their lives disrupted as a result. We have to go back to the Great Depression to find similar numbers, and even then the speed at which the current episode unfolded seems to have no identifiable precedent.
- If there is a silver lining in today’s report it is that it could have been worse, with today’s outcome broadly in line with the expectations embedded in our last forecast update.
- As those forecasts and today’s report show, we are in uncharted waters. Fortunately the unprecedented shock has brought unprecedented measures to keep the economy on life support during the battle with the coronavirus. Measures such as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) should help ease some of the pain of lost income, and the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy is designed to maintain the employer-employee relationship, ideally speeding up the eventual return to work.
- Indeed, it is notable that applications for the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy opened on April 27th, and so its effects would not have been captured in today’s employment numbers. We are also seeing some encouraging signs in the recent tapering off in CERB applications, and many provinces are either in the midst of gradual re-openings or planning them. Given the shock we’re dealing with, we should be careful not to be too optimistic, but we can at least start to have a bit of hope that the worst may be behind us.
