The February LFS stats are out. There's an interesting situation this month. For the second consecutive month, Calgary's Unemployment Rate has climbed. We went from a 2 year low at 7.5% back in December, back to 7.9% in February. This isn't great to be sure, but in a relative sense it isn't really so bad. Before the rate was 7.7% in november the first month with a lower unemployment rate is January 2016. So yes it's higher, but it's by no means as bad as what we've seen in the last couple of years.
As you'd expect the primary cause was an increase in the number of unemployed. The 67.3 thousand unemployed persons in the Calgary CMA back in December was the lowest since January 2016. We're back up to 72.4 thousand. which is slightly better than where we were back in October (73.2K).
But on the flip side,
employment in Calgary is actually at an all time high. There were 844.5 thousand employed persons in Calgary in February. That is 3,400 more than January. 10,400 more than December. 7,100 more than the high point in the summer. It also marks the 3rd consecutive month of employment growth.
The effect of both growing unemployment and employment pushed the participation rate back up to %74.4 and as it happens that's just ever so slightly above the average for the period from January 2010 to February 2018 at 74.14%. Why that period? Well that's all the data I retrieved. If we strictly look at a March 2013 to February 2018 5 year (60 month) rolling average, it's pretty much the same 73.83%. So at least over the the last several years roughly 74% has been pretty natural for Calgary.
Edmonton is actually an even more useful comparison that usual this month. Becuase their unemployment rate actually dropped from 7.2% in January to 6.9% in February. This is the first time they've posted an unemployment rate below 7% since march of 2016 which sounds good, but actually, they lost more employed people last month than we gained, 5,100. They also had 2,600 fewer unemployed people. The net effect is a participation rate of 71.4%. That's the lowest participation rate for them since early 2010. They came close for a few months around November of 2016 too, but this is one of the lowest points in the data I retrieved.
I think I'd rather take Calgary's situation where employment is growing and people are joining the Labour Force than Edmonton's where fewer people are working and fewer people want to work. Even if the popularly reported rate is better there than here.
EDIT: I'll also add, in case anyone is wondering, that the non-seasonally-adjusted numbers showed that full time employment grew while part time employment shrank for Calgary from January to February.
I'm also going to see if I can find any good data on wages.
Chart-y Goodness:
A little extra note on population. This is the working population (aged 15+). This is actually Calgary's fastest month of growth since May-June 2017. 0.15% compared to 0.16% back then. It's also the first month Calgary's rate of growth has actually been equal to Edmonton's since August 2017. Our growth rate has actually been predominantly slower since August 2016, even though our absolute growth has been equal or better for most of that time.