Employment growth has essentially stalled across the country, according to new numbers from Statistics Canada.
Through the month of December, the unemployment rate held steady at 5.8 per cent.
“Employment growth is not keeping pace with growth in the labour force source population,” said Fred Bergman, senior policy analyst with the Atlantic Economic Council.
Looking more specifically at the Maritimes, P.E.I. remained at 8.1 per cent, Nova Scotia dropped to six per cent from 6.8 in November, and New Brunswick rose to 6.8 per cent from 6.4.
In Moncton, businesses have adopted a wait and see attitude according to Greater Moncton Chamber of Commerce CEO John Wishart.
“They’re facing a lot of other cost pressures such as inflation, interest rates, a lot of them are looking at repaying their CEBA loans later this month, and so labour costs are one of the few levers they have to keep an eye on the bottom line so I’m not surprised that employment has sort of softened,” he said.
Overall, employment growth slowed in the second half of 2023 with December bringing in only 100 new net jobs for the entire country.
However, experts say it might not be as bleak as it first seems.
“You look at the 100 job total and somebody equated it to one or two fast food restaurants for all of Canada in terms of job growth and that’s not a lot, but it may, in an awkward way, be almost necessary to cool some of the inflationary pressures that we’ve seen,” said Wishart. “I think generally the business community is in for a bit of short term pain, long term gain scenario and labour is just one of those things.”
Bergman says Atlantic Canada actually did pretty well with both Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador seeing employment go up last month.
“When you look at the annual numbers, employment growth in all three Maritime provinces out paced national growth in employment in 2023 versus 2022 and in particular, P.E.I. led Canada with 5.7 per cent growth in employment in 2023 over the prior year,” he said.
He adds with the Maritimes seeing strong population growth across the region, it is helping drive up employment growth and stronger economic growth.
“We did see kind of decent numbers on some of the cities as well,” he said. “Some of the cities, the annual unemployment rates came out and I think in Saint John it was at about 5.4 per cent, 5.6 per cent in Moncton, [and] I think 5.4 per cent in Fredericton as well for the annual unemployment rate.”
Bruce Eisan works as the Atlantic Canada sales manager for Drake International, which is a staffing agency in Canada.
“This time of year, the construction industry for example goes down because there’s not a whole lot of construction going on so we find there’s an influx of construction workers,” he said. “So we work with them to maybe place them within a warehouse or maybe order picking, something alone those lines, that’ll keep them busy until that construction industry comes back again.”
Overall, he says there are more positions opening up and he expects a positive trend to continue.
“I see things improving, you know, last year was a tough year for a lot of people out there and we worked so hard to try to find anybody who came to use a position,” he said.
At this point, experts are pointing to inflation and interest rates starting to come down mid-year, which both Bergman and Wishart say is when we can expect things to pick back up.
“I know in our outlook we expected interest rates to start to fall by the second half of this year and this would help kind of re-stimulate the economy as interest rates slow or come down and people start spending a bit more,” said Bergman. “So things will start to pick back up in the second half of the year, but the first half of the year, clearly things are slowing and clearly at the national level things have basically stalled.”
