economy
AN UNEVEN RECOVERY FROM COAST-TO-COAST Between February and April of this year, more than 3 million jobs across Canada were cast aside as our country entered a collective shutdown to ward off the worst of the emerging pandemic. No province was spared, with job losses ranging from 75,400 on the East Coast (Nova Scotia), to 1.09 million in Central Canada (Ontario), to 361,000 in the Prairies (Alberta), to 396,000 on the West Coast (BC). In relative terms, job losses during this brief period ranged from a low of 12.7% in Saskatchewan to a high of 18.7% in Quebec, averaging 15.5% nationally.
the original shutdown and subsequent re- opening, and the underlying composition of each respective economy. This is also true for regional economies. Across Canada’s 33 Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs), the pace of recovery has varied widely. For example, while Canada as a whole has recovered 44% of its original job losses, the Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo CMA has only regained 20% of all lost jobs. With the worst of the Covid-19 outbreak hitting Quebec and Ontario early in March, those two provinces have seen their regional economies recover relatively quickly. In contrast, each of BC’s four CMAs has re- captured less than half of its job losses, with Vancouver employment still 69% below its early-year peak. With each month’s employment increment adding fewer jobs than the month before, BC’s rehabilitation is likely to be long-term.
As uneven as the losses were, so too has been the pace of recovery, ranging from Ontario’ 9.4% growth (or rate of re-capture) from April’s employment lows to Quebec’s 17.7% (BC has seen employment grow by 11.5% since April). Many factors are at play in each province’s recovery, including the incidence of Covid-19, the specific nature of
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