Friday’s labour force statistics begin to paint a clearer picture of how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the local job market.
For the past two months, the job data from Statistics Canada has been unclear. The national agency uses a sample survey for its monthly labour force updates. If the sample size is too small, they avoid reporting certain statistics.
March’s job numbers for the city were complete, allowing for a year-over-year comparison with March 2020.
Last month, Prince Albert had an estimated 20,500 people working and 1,600 looking for work. Around 12,600 residents were not in the labour force, meaning they were neither working nor looking for work.
As a result, Prince Albert had an unemployment rate of 7.2 per cent, a participation rate of 64 per cent and an employment rate of 59.1 per cent.
Data for last March wasn’t complete, there was data for last February, the month before COVID-19 led to province-wide shutdowns.
In February 2020, Prince Albert had 21,800 people working, 1,500 unemployed and 11,600 not in the labour force.
The city’s participation rate was 66.6 per cent, unemployment was at 6.4 per cent and the employment rate is 62.3 per cent.
Since the pandemic reached Saskatchewan, the city has lost about 1,300 jobs, but only seen the number of unemployed change by about 100.
That’s reflected by the change in the participation rate, which measures the percentage of a population that is either working or looking for work, as well as the employment rate, which measures the percentage of people working as a proportion of the working-age population.
Since February of 2020, Prince Albert’s employment rate has fallen by 3.2 percentage points while its participation rate has fallen by 2.6 percentage points.
The city isn’t the only jurisdiction battling lower employment numbers.
The Saskatchewan NDP put out a press release last week calling Saskatchewan’s situation when it comes to COVID-19 the worst of both worlds.
They pointed to data that showed Saskatchewan’s net job loss since last February is 23,000, or four per cent, the worst among all provinces.
It also showed zero job creation month-to-month and 1,300 jobs lost since last March, the only province with fewer jobs year-over-year.
Nationally, employment rose by 1.6 per cent in March and came to within 1.5 per cent of its pre-COVID February 2020 level. That is equivalent to 296,000 people.
Statistics Canada also said that nationally, the labour underutilization rate fell to 14.7 per cent, the lowest level since February 2020. There were 1.5 million Canadians unemployed in March 2021, up 371,000 from February of last year. That’s a 32.4 per cent increase.
