There’s a saying about liars figuring and figures lying and it comes to mind when reviewing August’s job numbers.
They came out Friday and showed Saskatchewan adding jobs and our population went up, but our unemployment rate was higher. Getting a negative number out of a growth story seems a little out of kilter.
But that’s the way these figures are calculated. Almost 5,000 more people considered themselves in the labour pool. More than half were the result of population growth because of migration and the rest were people previously on the sidelines returning to the job hunt.
Nearly 3,000 of them found work. Under normal circumstances that would probably be a lead story, but when 3,000 new positions aren’t enough to keep up with an expanding population, this is new territory for Saskatchewan whose history is more readily associated with out-migration and job loss than this kind of growth.
Nonetheless, both our participation and employment rates also went up, so, we’re actually narrowing the gap between the volume of new citizens and employment opportunities for them.
