The economy is heating up and jobs are plentiful: that's the headline from the latest Statistics Canada employment data for November.
By the numbers:
- 154,000 new jobs were created in November, surging past analyst expectations of 38,000 new positions. By way of comparison, 210,000 jobs were created in the U.S. during the same period.
- The unemployment rate fell from 6.7% to 6%, just 0.3 points above pre-COVID levels.
- A record high 80.7% of women between the ages of 25 and 54 were working.
Dig deeper: Most of the new jobs created in November were in service industries, like healthcare (where 44,000 new jobs were added).
Hospitality jobs (like restaurant servers and bartenders) remained mostly unchanged in spite of large numbers of job vacancies, suggesting that employers may need to raise wages to attract workers.
Why it's happening: A combo of pandemic savings, the holiday shopping season, and low interest rates are creating high demand for services from consumers, and employers are hiring to respond to that demand.
Zoom out: The economy appears to be on a solid trajectory right now, but whether that continues or the recovery is derailed will depend largely on the severity of new COVID variants.