Did you hear we lost 39,000 full-time jobs in the month of February? It wasn’t part of the Stats Canada news release so unless you went looking deeper in the numbers you wouldn’t know this.

Now it is not unusual for media outlets to just go with the topline numbers and report something along the lines of 15,000 jobs were added but the truth is that is only because the addition of 54,700 part-time jobs off-set the loss of 39,300 full-time jobs.

I still can’t believe that Stats Canada didn’t put that in their news release and instead went directly to bragging about year-over-year job gains. Which were good, employment grew by 283,000 or 1.5% from February 2017 to February 2018, but losing 39,000 full-time jobs in a month should be noted.

Especially when 28,500 of those lost full-time jobs were in British Columbia alone.

The last time I took issue with the Stats Canada jobs report was last April when headlines screamed about Canada adding jobs of the 9th straight month but failed to mention in many stories the 88,000 full-time jobs that were lost that month.

In all my years covering Stats Canada I have found them to be scrupulously non-partisan. Let’s hope they remain that way and that this omission was not an attempt by them to downplay the bad news to make their current political masters look good.