Canadians' wage growth slowed to a crawl in early 2016, new data from Statistics Canada show, as employers demonstrated a cautious mood and the oil shock deepened its grip on regional payrolls.

Statscan's Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours (SEPH), the national statistical agency's monthly gathering of labour data from employers and payroll tax-deduction filings, showed that average weekly earnings in February were up just 0.4 per cent from a year earlier. That follows a January report that showed a thin 0.1-per-cent increase. On a month-over-month basis, the February numbers edged up 0.3 per cent from January, but that didn't make up for the sharp 1-per-cent decline in January – leaving average wages down 0.6 per cent from the end of 2015.

The survey also found that employer payrolls shrank by 34,300 jobs in February, adding to the loss of 30,600 positions in January. That paints a much darker picture of hiring than was shown in Statscan's previously released Labour Force Survey, which estimated that jobs on private and government payrolls dipped 5,300 in February after growing 14,500 in January. (The Labour Force Survey – a monthly poll of Canadian households – estimated that payroll employment surged by 63,000 jobs in March.)

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The country's year-over-year wage growth has been on a generally downward trend for the past year, as the impact of the collapse of prices for oil and other commodities spread throughout major resource-producing provinces and the broader national economy. The pace for January and February was the slowest in the 15 years that Statscan has tracked comparable data.

In recession-mired Alberta – where the survey showed employers have shed 30,000 jobs in the first two months of the year – average earnings were down 3.4 per cent year over year in February, coming on the heels of a 4.3-per-cent drop in January. Workers in the province have suffered declines in both their average hourly wages and their average number of hours worked. Average earnings in Newfoundland, another heavily oil-dependent province, were down 0.4 per cent in February.

Even outside the oil-producing regions, wage growth remains modest. In British Columbia and Ontario, the country's two fastest-growing provincial economies, average earnings grew just 0.5 per cent and 1 per cent year over year, respectively.

The country's strongest wage growth was in Nova Scotia, up 2.5 per cent.

Overall, Canadians on payrolls worked an average of 32.9 hours a week in February, flat from both January and a year earlier, Statscan said.