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Crisis? What crisis?
by Scott Gilbreath ~ October 10th, 2008
Statistics Canada this morning reports the largest monthly increase in employment on record.
Statistics Canada said Friday that, in September, the economy created 107,000 new jobs, defying predictions of economists who were expecting only one-tenth as many new jobs.
Statistics Canada said that it has never recorded such a large one-month gain since it first began collecting this data in 1976.
For the first time in over 25 years, Canada’s unemployment rate is as low as in the United States.
This morning’s employment data release appears to vindicate National Post editorialists who called Stéphane Dion and Jack Layton “panic-mongers” and “Chicken Little”.
Statistics Canada also pointed out that the Canadian job market is performing far better than the American.
Over the first nine months of this year, the labour market in Canada has followed a trend different from that of the United States. So far in 2008, employment in Canada has been growing, albeit at a slower pace compared with last year, while in the United States employment has fallen. When adjusted to approximate United States measurement concepts, the unemployment rate in Canada has remained relatively stable at around 5.3% so far this year, while in the United States, it has risen by 1.1 percentage points to 6.1%.
Average hourly wages rose by 4.6% in September, well above the latest inflation rate of 3.5%.
Also this morning, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty took action to prevent the international financial crisis from harming Canada’s banking system, assessed yesterday by the World Economic Forum as the best in the world.
“Other countries have had to react to internal problems in their domestic banks,” Mr. Flaherty said. “In contrast, our Canadian financial institutions are sound, well capitalized and we are proactively responding to insure that events beyond our borders do not interrupt the availability of credit in this country.”
If the Liberals and NDP continue to make the economy the central issue in the closing days of the election campaign, they do so at their peril.
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