Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
In normal circumstances, the loss of more than 200,000 Canadian jobs in a single month couldn’t be construed as anything but a horrific train wreck.
But our current circumstances are far from normal. And under the circumstances – with deepest apologies to the people who had their livelihood snatched from them by the second wave of the pandemic – some of the details of last Friday’s January employment report looked a lot more encouraging than the dismaying headlines. There’s a remarkably resilient economy poking out beneath the ugly surface.
And ugly it is. Statistics Canada reported the country shed 213,000 jobs in January, the worst month since last spring’s nosedive triggered by the first COVID-19 lockdowns. The unemployment rate jumped to 9.4 per cent from 8.8 per cent, a five-month high.
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