CLC Says April Unemployment Statistics Still Grim

OTTAWA, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - May 9, 2014) - New Statistics Canada unemployment figures for April are grim again and show the federal government has no solutions for the country's more than one million unemployed, says the Canadian Labour Congress.

The Labour Force Survey for April 2014 released by statistics Canada showed the official unemployment rate was 6.9% in April, a number that shows no improvement over March. What's worse, the CLC says the rate of underemployment remained unacceptably high at 14.8%.

Canada's 1.33 million unemployed can find no hope in these latest numbers and this government not only has no clue what to do, it doesn't even have a clue what the real job vacancy rate is, the CLC says.

And the Congress echoed Auditor General Michael Ferguson's call this week for better jobs data, saying that making huge decisions on Employment Insurance, training and economic policy on faulty, inadequate statistics has already been disastrous for Canada's unemployed.

This is a very serious problem - the federal government doesn't know how many job vacancies there are in Canada yet it is letting employers import over 330,000 migrant workers under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, according to the CLC.

Statistics Canada job market and other figures demonstrate that Canada has too many unemployed, too many migrant workers, too little accurate information and no government plan to fix any of it. That is a sad commentary on a government that likes to claim it knows what it's doing but is actually in the dark.

Quick Analysis from CLC Senior Economist Angella MacEwen

There were 29,000 fewer jobs in April 2014 compared to the month before. The unemployment rate remained at 6.9% as fewer workers were participating in the labour force. Quebec suffered the largest job losses and Ontario gained a small number of jobs. All of the job losses were among employees, as the number of self-employed workers increased between March and April 2014. All of the jobs lost this month were full-time jobs. Year over year there has been a disproportionate increase in part-time employment, as half of the jobs added since last April were part-time.

The only group to make employment gains year over year (compared to April 2013) were workers over 55, mostly women. This is mostly due to population aging as employed workers move into the older age group. Young workers, and men and women 25-54 saw virtually no employment gains over last April.

The underemployment rate for April 2014 was 14.8%, and 28.8% for young workers between 15 and 24.

The Canadian Labour Congress, the national voice of the labour movement, represents 3.3 million Canadian workers. The CLC brings together Canada's national and international unions along with the provincial and territorial federations of labour and 111 district labour councils.

Web site: www.canadianlabour.ca

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