economy
FEWER VACANCIES EXIST, BUT CHALLENGES PERSIST While job vacancies have been declining in Canada—a good thing— some sectors continue to struggle in their search for workers.
Job vacancies, which Statistics Canada first started tracking in 2015, have been persistently high the past two years, reaching an all-time high in May of last year at 1.04 million nationally. Notably, job vacancies were not declining alongside the unemployment rate in 2021 and 2022 as the labour market looked to find its footing. In the previous edition of the rennie landscape, we looked at how large numbers of job vacancies were contributing to higher offered wages and higher overall wage growth. Since then, the landscape of job vacancies has shifted nationally, but some issues persist. The total job vacancy rate in Canada declined substantially at the end of 2022, going from 5.6% in September to 4.2% in December. The total number of vacancies went from just under 1 million to 750,000 over the same period, a 24% decline. That this coincides with a decreasing unemployment rate over that period suggests that many of those jobs could have been filled and not just removed.
Many industries enjoyed substantial declines in their job vacancy rates, such as Accommodation and Food Services going from 10.0% to 6.6% or Construction 7.3% to 4.9%. In terms of the overall number of job vacancies, however, some sectors continue to see large numbers of jobs going unfilled. Even though the vacancy rate in Health Care declined to 6.2% from 6.6%, it now has the most total job vacancies, with close to 150,000 unfilled positions in a growing industry (remember that aging population?). The mismatch between workers and jobs appears to be subsiding to a degree, but not evenly across sectors. As Canada looks to bring more workers into its labour force through international migration (discussed later) there is a clear need to prioritize skill sets that are underrepresented in our current labour pool.
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