October's job numbers are bleak, a deflating reminder that economic recovery is a slow beast, indeed, and that jobs cut in a slowdown take some time to come back, if at all.
After two months of moderate job growth, employment across the country fell by 43,200 jobs last month, all of them part time, Statistics Canada said Friday.
The drop-off pushes Canada's unemployment rate up 0.2 per cent to 8.6 per cent, which many, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, predict will continue to climb, reaching around 10 per cent in 2010.
This erases the positive growth in September of about 30,000 jobs and demonstrates that employers are still hesitant to take on new hires or replace fired staff as this epic downturn begins to unwind.
"(This) undoes much of the surprisingly strong reported improvement in September," Erin Weir, an economist with the United Steelworkers, wrote in a note.
Most of the job losses came from Alberta (14,900), British Columbia (12,900) and Ontario (12,000).
Down south, the news was even more grim, with the United States' unemployment rate breaching the double digits to land at 10.2 per cent, the highest since April 1983.
In Canada, most of the month's disappointing declines came from retail, wholesale and natural resources.
The data, contained in Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey, showed women aged 25 and older and youths between 15 and 24 accounted for all job losses in October.
"October was a reality check for a Canadian labour market that had been seeing a lot of hiring without much to show for it in terms of production," Avery Shenfeld, CIBC World Markets' chief economist, wrote in a research note.
"October's report hinted that the earlier run-up may have, in part, been statistical noise ... Put the last three months together, and the trend shows very small net hiring on average, a result that is much more consistent with the limited growth we've thus far seen in economic output."
The Canadian Auto Workers said October's job losses highlighted the need for more government stimulus and that service-sector job losses are inevitable when core, unionized sectors are hit.
Ken Lewenza, CAW president, said workers who are still employed face a difficult future.
"The challenge now is that workers in these largely non-unionized industries do not have the same transitional supports and services provided to unionized employees, which creates an even heavier burden for them during bad economic times," Lewenza said.
The job losses would have been even worse, but the 43,200 was offset by a gain of 27,500 in the nebulous "self-employed" category, which many economists discount because it could be involuntary and unproductive.
"We are always skeptical about the self-employed category, but most so during times of recession," writes Stewart Hall, an economist with HSBC Securities (Canada).
"It is fair to ask just what the 27.5 thousand newly self-employed are doing with their time and what kind of contribution they are making to GDP at this point in the economic cycle."
Since employment in Canada peaked in October 2008, the economy has shed around 400,000 jobs.
But the latest numbers, Weir writes, show the first full year of employment data since the economic crash took hold.
And the conclusions are not positive.
"A sectoral breakdown implies a disproportionately large loss of relatively good jobs," Weir writes.
"More than half of the employment decline, 218,000, was in manufacturing.
"Construction and other goods-producing industries eliminated a further 112,000 jobs.
"The entire service sector shrank by 70,000."
It wasn't all bad news, though, with full-time employment, including self-employment, increasing by 16,500 jobs.
Also on the plus side, construction jobs were up, as were transportation and warehousing.
The manufacturing sector continued to fare poorly.
"The ongoing pressures to Canadian manufacturing remain evident as inventories continue to be drawn down and firms remain hesitant about boosting production," TD Bank economist Grant Bishop wrote in a note.
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