Monday, February 16, 2015

Ontario January 2015 Employment Numbers

I've meant to get around to looking at the latest employment numbers for Ontario. Canada added a decent 35.4K jobs in January compared to the month before. Ontario not so much.

Ontario added a meager 1300 jobs in January, although that was an improvement over the last two months where Ontario actually lost jobs. That means over the last three months Ontario actually lost 43.4 thousand jobs, which makes for a pretty poor three month period. Employment numbers can jump a lot from month to month, but this poor performance over three months has to be taken seriously and detracts from the narrative that Ontario is growing well (and can't be great for the fourth quarter of 2014 GDP number).

The composition of the jobs also changed detrimentally last month. Ontario lost 23.2 thousand full time jobs while gaining 24.4 thousand part-time jobs. This would seem to be continuing a trend where in Ontario the proportion of jobs that are part-time is increasing.

Interestingly, over four months Ontario has actually lost 19.1 thousand full-time jobs, while the working age population increased by 31.9 thousand. Part-time jobs did increase by 24.4 thousand over that period.

One has to think that these low job numbers are going to have an effect on GDP, and income and sales tax revenue for the province. RBC is predicting Ontario will have 3.1% GDP growth in this PDF. I'm skeptical. Considering the low dollar hasn't done a lot to stimulate job growth over the past four months, I don't see a lot of job growth in 2015. That report is also predicting employment growth of 1.4% in 2015.

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