Southern Alberta job numbers better than average
By Medicine Hat News on September 5, 2020.
Unemployment in rural southern Alberta sits well below the provincial average and other areas where joblessness is as much as double last year’s rates. New figures on Friday from Statistics Canada peg the unemployment rate in the Lethbridge-Medicine Hat economic region at 8.6 per cent in August. That’s down 1.1 percentage points from July, but 1.5 points higher than August 2019. Major centres of Calgary and Edmonton had the highest official rates last month, of 14.2 and 14.1 per cent, respectively. Again, that’s slightly lower than in the summer, but approaches twice the rate from 12 months ago. Alberta’s rate of 11.8 per cent sits second highest in the nation, behind only Newfoundland an Labrador (13.1 per cent), and above the national average of 10.2 per cent. Saskatchewan had the lowest rate of any province at 7.9 per cent. Statistics Canada says the economy added 246,000 mostly full-time jobs in August as the pace of gains slowed compared to July, when 419,000 jobs were added. The figure marked the fourth consecutive month of gains from COVID-19 lockdown, bringing the number to within 1.1 million of pre-pandemic levels. More employed people also saw hours increase and more workers returned to work places. In Alberta, the number of employed people rose by just under 10,000, but the number of people seeking work fell, leading to only a small gain in the rate calculation. Each region in Alberta showed at least small month-over-month improvement with the exception of Camrose-Drumheller (13.4 per cent in August). Red Deer (12.9 per cent), Banff-Grande Prairie (12.1 per cent), and Wood Buffalo (11.8 per cent) all saw declines from July. The rates, however, are up significantly from 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic slowed economic activity and volatile energy prices this spring hammered the oilpatch. The Alberta-wide average in August 2019 was 7.2 per cent. The News does not report figures for Medicine Hat as Statistics Canada considers them to be statistically unreliable due to small sample size. 12-11
