WASHINGTON: Efforts by the Government of Nunavut and Inuit organizations to curb the territory’s high unemployment rates, which are higher than anywhere else in Canada, appear to have had little effect in the past five years. And unemployment rates among Inuit, mostly unchanged over those five years, continue to be significantly higher than among non-Inuit. That’s according to new data released by Statistics Canada May 6 in an update to their annual Labour Force Survey.
Total unemployment in Nunavut for the months of February to April hovered around 15.4 per cent, according to StatsCan, and around 20.1 per cent for Inuit. That means the total unemployment rate is up 2.5 per cent from the same time period in 2015, and up 3.3 per cent for Inuit from a year ago, according to StatsCan figures. Data on the website of the GN’s Nunavut Bureau of Statistics, which compiles Nunavut-specific data from StatsCan, shows that the five-year average unemployment rate among Inuit from all communities is around 20.5 per cent.
