Statscan Canada Job Numbers for January 2015, Up By 35,000

The numbers are out here. An increase of 35,000 is impressive even without an oil crash.

The provincial numbers were interesting:

"Employment in Alberta rose by 14,000 in January, bringing gains over the past 12 months to 67,000 or 3.0%, the fastest growth rate among the provinces. Year-over-year employment gains in Alberta were in health care and social assistance as well as in transportation and warehousing, while there was a decrease in retail and wholesale trade. Employment in natural resources was little changed on a year-over-year basis, but it was down 13,000 (-7.2%) from the most recent peak in September 2014. The unemployment rate in the province was 4.5% in January."

"Employment in the remaining provinces was little changed between December and January."

So even with oil collapsing and the dollar collapsing, employment in Alberta still went up. Certainly employment losses could be coming down the road. By contrast, Ontario lost small amounts of jobs in November and December and not much change for January. So much for Ontario leading the county in GDP growth.

I'll look more closely at the Ontario and Hamilton numbers in another post on the weekend.

2013 Canadian Homicide Data is Out, Hamilton Had 15 Murders in 2013

Statscan has released data on murder in Canada in 2013 and the various Canadian newspapers have jumped all over it. The Globe has a good article here.

I wasn't sure of the exact number of murders last year in Hamilton, but apparently it is 15 (I had thought it was 13). That is a murder rate of 2.04 per 100,000 inhabitants. Interestingly that works out to a population of approximately 735,000 which is significantly higher than Hamilton's population. So that probably is the census area and includes Burlington and Grimsby but I could be wrong. So it could well be that Hamilton itself has had 13 murders in 2013, which would work out to a murder rate of 2.5 per 100,000 if we use a Hamilton only population of 520,000. Which isn't so great.

However Hamilton this year is doing a lot better on the killing front, with only 7 murders so far in 2014 with less than a month to do. If Hamilton gets through the year with only 7 that would work out to a rate per 100,000 of only 1.35 (using a population of 520,000) which would be considerably better. For 2013 Hamilton had the fifth most murders per capita, but a rate of 1.35 would move us well down the list.

Here's the murders for each city followed by the rate per 100,000 for all the cities Statscan tracks:

Regina 9 3.85
Winnipeg 26 3.24
Thunder Bay 3 2.46
Edmonton 27 2.09
Hamilton 15 2.04
London 9 1.8
Calgary 24 1.75
Vancouver 42 1.72
Abbotsford-Mission 3 1.69
Saskatoon 5 1.67
Kelowana 3 1.62
Gatineau 5 1.55
KW Cambridge 8 1.5
St John’s 3 1.62
Halifax 6 1.47
Barrie 3 1.44
Saint John 2 1.37
St Catharines-Niagara 6 1.35
Toronto 79 1.34
Montreal 43 1.68
Oshawa 4 0.97
Ottawa 9 0.92
Brantford 1 0.7
Trois-Rivieres 1 0.65
Kingston 1 0.61
Greater Sudbury 1 0.61
Windsor 2 0.61
Quebec 3 0.38
Victoria 1 0.28
Moncton 0
Saguenay 0
Sherbrook 0
Perterborough 0
Guelph 0

July 2014 Canadian Jobs Numbers Revised Upward

So the previously reports July 2014 jobs numbers weren't as bad as previously declared by Statscan with 42,000 jobs gained rather than 200 in their revision released today.

However, the report was still mediocre overall despite the overall job number gain. The number of part-time job numbers stayed at 60,000 created, but the full-time job losses were reduced from 60,000 to 18,000. So full-time jobs still lost, although we created a bucket full of part-time jobs. Is Canada becoming a nation of part-time jobs? It would seem so, although perhaps it is more that places like Ontario are awash in part-time jobs and week on full-time jobs.

Rarely does Canadian economic news make doomster site Zero Hedge, but this revision did. From Zero Hedge's post:

• Self employment fell 37K in July from 23.4K in prior month; self employment was originally reported as -29.2K

In other words, Canada mysterioualy had a swing of over 67K self-employed jobs in the month. Congratulations.

And so on. The bottom line: it is increasingly becoming the case that "unpleasant" official economic numbers are released, they show ugly "recessionary" data, and are subsequently revised much higher to stem the public outcry as analysts scream "bloody recession." 

The fact the shift was in self employment is pretty shady. Someone declaring themselves self-employed and full-time self-employed isn't economically the same thing as getting a full-time job with an existing firm. Anyways, it will be interesting to see how GDP growth for Ontario and Canada correlates with the overall employment numbers, especially the shift to part-time from full-time employment.