Canadian Labor Force Survey for June 2022

Statistics Canada (StatsCan) reported on July 8th that employment in Canada decreased by 43,000 or 0.2% in June. Completely eliminating May’s record increase of 40,000 jobs. The first employment decline since January 2022.

The unemployment rate reached a new historic low of 4.9% in June, down 0.2 percentage points from the previous record in May. The total number of unemployed workers fell by 54,000 or 4.1% to 1.0 million.

With both employment and unemployment falling in June, the labor force participation rate—the proportion of the working age population who were either employed or unemployed—fell 0.4 percentage points from May to 64.9%.

The number of people who had been continuously unemployed for 27 weeks or more stood at 185,000 in June, a drop of 24,000 or 1.3% compared with May. The decline was driven entirely by a decrease in the number of people who had been continuously unemployed for one year or longer (22,000; 17.5%). StatsCan notes that typically, people who are unemployed for one year or longer are more likely than those who are unemployed for shorter periods of time to drop out of unemployment because they stop looking for work. Among people who were in this group in May, 21.3% stopped looking for work in June, while 9.4% became employed. The remaining 69.3% remained unemployed (three-month moving averages, not seasonally adjusted).