Latest job recovery estimates are encouraging, but there is still a long way to go
While Canada’s labour market has started to recover from the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, estimates reveal that it still has quite a long way to go.
The median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg showed that 365,000 jobs have been recovered in July – which would bring the total number of jobs recovered over the last three months to 1.6 million. While encouraging, the estimate would represent only a little over half of the 3 million jobs lost at the start of the pandemic in March and April.
Read more: Has Canada's labour market recovery hit a standstill?
According to Bloomberg, there is also some uncertainty with the estimate, with “the range of forecasts varying from 130,000 to 900,000.”
Additionally, several groups are still struggling to recover from the economic aftershock – including women, immigrants, and low-income earners. Economists also expect upcoming jobs data from Statistics Canada to show that visible minorities have been “disproportionately hurt by the recession,” according to Bloomberg.
“We are going to see quite a lot of racial impact in who was hit hardest because low income often intersects with race and recent immigration status as well as gender and youth,” Armine Yalnizyan, a research fellow at the Atkinson Foundation, told Bloomberg.
