OTTAWA — Canada’s economy is reporting its biggest one-month employment surge since 1976, when the government started collecting comparable data.

Statistics Canada says the labour market added 106,500 jobs in April, the bulk of which were full time.

The increase helped drop the unemployment rate to 5.7 per cent last month, down from 5.8 per cent in March.

In Alberta, the jobless rate fell to 6.7 per cent compared to 6.9 per cent in March.

Calgary’s jobless rate hit 7.6 per cent in April.

Economist Trevor Tombe with the University of Calgary says the numbers are good for Alberta but one month’s figures don’t tell the whole story.

“We should look more to trends to get a sense of where Alberta is headed. At least recently the trends have been fairly disappointing in many indicators including employment over the last number of months.”

Tombe goes on to say that there’s more to the job numbers than just positive gains.

“We’ve seen a number of months in a row with pretty disappointing job numbers and so this gain should be seen in light of the losses that we’ve seen in December and January in particular.”

Employment grew 0.6 per cent with the April increase, which was the highest proportional monthly expansion since 1994.

A closer look at the April numbers reveals the overall gain was driven by the creation of 73,000 full-time jobs and 83,800 positions in the private sector.

Economists had expected a gain of 10,000 jobs for the month and the unemployment rate to remain at 5.8 per cent, according to Thomson Reuters Eikon.

Compared with a year earlier, Canada added 426,400 for a proportional increase of 2.3 per cent.

Year-over-year average hourly wage growth for all employees in April was 2.5 per cent, up from a reading of 2.4 per cent for March.

The gains were spread across many industries, with both the services and factory sectors seeing employment increases.

With files from The Canadian Press



