OTTAWA: The Canadian economy added 12,000 jobs in August, but the unemployment rate ticked up to seven per cent as 40,000 more people were looking for work.
Prior to August, the unemployment rate had been steady since January, at 6.8 per cent.
Over the past 12 months, Canada’s economy has added 193,000 jobs, Statistics Canada said in a release Friday.
August’s gain comes after a smaller one in July, which together represent the first back-to-back months of job gains since the price of oil started to crater last fall, Bank of Montreal noted.
A consensus of economists polled by Bloomberg ahead of the data’s release had been expecting a loss of about 5,000 jobs for the month.
Most of the jobs were full time, as the data agency said the economy added 54,400 full-time jobs. That figure was slightly offset by a drop of 42,400 part-time positions.
But the news is not all good. A large chunk of the job gains came from the public sector, but economists say in a healthy growing economy, the private sector should be doing the heavy lifting.
“While the full-time hiring tally is encouraging, job gains were again concentrated in the public sector [up 27,000] while private sector hiring was more modest [up 6,000],” TD bank economist Leslie Preston said. Self-employment was down by 22,000 jobs, Preston noted.
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