If we are to believe the latest job numbers from StatsCan, all the jobs in a city the size of Weyburn disappeared from Saskatchewan last month. And, interestingly, a comparable number appeared in Manitoba.
We tend to rely fairly heavily on the monthly employment numbers – what StatsCan calls its Labour Force Survey – for guidance on how the labour market is performing. From there we can extrapolate whether the overall economy is on the rise or in decline: more jobs usually mean things are looking up andvice versa.
But the January figures are one of those months with a massive change. Apparently, we lost more than 6,000 jobs last month. While a change of this magnitude is possible, you’d think we would have heard about something that big before the StatsCan report was issued. And, similarly, Manitoba produced a volatile number – up roughly as much as we went down.
When you look at the three-month rolling average in this report, apparently all the declines came in the Moose Jaw- Swift Current corridor. Every other part of the province was showing job growth.
