Blog
Impact of COVID-19 on Career Development
How has COVID-19 affected the career development sector? With the shutdown of non-essential businesses and organizations across Canada, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to far-reaching impacts across all labour market sectors. Front-line workers are coping with longer shifts, health and safety concerns, and escalating client needs within this new reality. Many businesses are trying to…Read More
COVID-19 Job Losses Concentrated Among the Lowest Earners
Employment fell by a further 1,993,800 (11%) in April, bringing total job losses to more than 3 million over the past two months. The official unemployment rate now stands at 13.0%, up from 7.8% in March. The job losses in March and April both far exceed the previous largest drop in employment recorded in the…Read More
Addressing critical workforce needs: Ensuring Canada’s food supply in times of crisis
Until a few weeks ago, most Canadians hadn’t thought much about where their food comes from, who produces it, or if there would be enough for everyone. Panic buying across the country has meant that one week there are no eggs in grocery stores, and the next week there is no flour. Confronted with empty…Read More
Gender Implications of COVID-19 Unemployment
Between February and March 2020, the Canadian unemployment rate jumped from 5.6% to 7.8%. This was driven, in large part, by increases in temporary layoffs for occupations in sales and service, education, law, and social, community and government services. As non-essential businesses were forced to close, unemployment in these (and other) occupations grew substantially. This…Read More
Essential Services and Occupations: A Pan-Canadian List
To ensure the labour market information we share is up to date, we will continue to update our Pan-Canadian Essential Services List as new LMI emerges about the effects of the pandemic on the labour force. Our latest update was on April 28, 2020. Download the updated list here. LMIC has worked to pinpoint the…Read More
A (Small) Glimmer of Hope in Today’s Job Report?
Today’s job report was pretty bleak. We had some early indications (e.g. the number of EI and CERB claims) of how deep the job losses would be and, unfortunately, we have some reason to believe that it will likely get worse before it gets better. But are there signs it will get better? Yes. There…Read More
Early Signs of the COVID-19 Impact on Canada’s Job Market
Employment fell by 1,010,700 in March in Canada – the largest drop on record –and the unemployment rate jumped to 7.8% from 5.6% in February. So say the first official statistics covering the onset of the COVID-19 crisis (see Figure 1), released today as part of the Labour Force Survey (LFS). Although these early indicators…Read More
COVID-19: Our Commitment to Canadians
The decisions Canadians make about jobs, careers, education, training and workforce development just got a lot tougher. We at LMIC are discussing how to best serve our stakeholders with content that is relevant in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the meantime we will reduce our publishing and social media activities and encourage all…Read More
Digging Deep Reveals New LMI Findings
We conducted a series of public opinion surveys on ten groups of Canadians to understand their top labour market information (LMI) needs, sources and challenges. We reported key findings through a series of dashboards, LMI Insights and public presentations. But, we also wanted to gain deeper insights, such as whether young people face different LMI…Read More
Working Moms
The last UN Progress of the World’s Women, a report that annually takes stock of the situation of women around the globe, focused on families and the role they play in women’s lives. As labour economists (and women) we wanted to take a closer look at a key family decision impacting women’s presence in the…Read More