It’s a bit of a head-scratcher.

Despite the Toronto area’s relatively high unemployment rate, more residents found work, and at a higher than average pace, in 2013, according to Statistics Canada data.

Employment rose an impressive 3.8 per cent in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area, which includes most of the GTA’s suburban regions, with the exception of Oshawa.

“You find a city that’s had more employment growth in 2013, on average,” Derek Burleton challenged. “Even Calgary had less employment growth,” said the deputy chief economist for TD Bank, referring to the city that’s been one of the country’s economic hot spots in recent years, thanks to the oil boom.

Employment in the City of Toronto itself grew a better-than-average 2.7 per cent, the federal data also reveals. The city beat both the province and the country, which rose 1.4 and 1.3 per cent respectively.

At the same time, the city’s jobless rate climbed to 10.1 per cent toward year end, wiping out two years of gains, a report to the economic development committee said Tuesday.

How is it possible to have both higher employment and higher unemployment at the same time? And what does it mean? Is Toronto’s economy on fire or headed for the dumpster?

Even economists say the data is a bit perplexing.

“It’s a challenge to explain. The data is sending mixed signals,” Burleton said.

One of the explanations for Toronto’s rising rates of both employment and unemployment is simple population growth, says Peter Viducis, manager of economic research for the city of Toronto.

More people are coming here looking for work, he said, particularly young people, recent graduates and new immigrants. Some have more success than others.

William Bustamante, 41, moved to Toronto from Ecuador last February with his three children and pregnant wife. It took him six months to find work in his field, with the help of the YMCA Newcomer Information Centre.

The experienced accountant took an entry-level job at TD Bank, which he was thrilled to get. He said he fully expected to have to take a lower-level job than the one he had in Ecuador, but his salary is still higher in Canada. “(Newcomers) should remain positive, because the jobs are out there,” Bustamante said.

On the other hand, Felipe Cerqueira, 25, moved to Toronto from Brazil to complete a post-graduate degree at Humber College in global business. Since graduating last year he has applied for “more than a hundred” jobs in his field. “I think that when you get to the final interview and it’s a Canadian and me, they always choose the Canadian,” he said.

Cerqueira hopes to use his background to find work in international trade between South and North America. But he’s burned through a large part of his savings and fears he’s running out of time.

“It’s disappointing and depressing. … I’m trying to meet new people and see what happens. In the worst-case scenario, I have to go back home,” he said.

Another factor in Toronto’s growing labour market is the way Statistics Canada gathers data, Viducis speculated.

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The labour force survey is based on where people live, not where they work. Thus, a person living in Toronto is counted as part of Toronto’s workforce, regardless of whether they’re employed in Toronto or Mississauga or Pickering.

As more people move into the city, reversing a decades-long flight to the suburbs, they’re counted as part of Toronto’s labour force, Viducis noted.

So, what does all of this mean in terms of Toronto’s economic performance?

Burleton looked at the city’s gross domestic product, a measure of all the goods and services produced by an economy. For the Toronto area, the GDP growth rate has been about 2 per cent a year in recent years.

“That’s a pretty lacklustre performance,” Burleton said. “Toronto’s not a booming economy, but it’s not shrinking, either.”

The city conducts its own employment survey annually. Unlike Statistics Canada, the city’s planning department actually visits places of work.

The 2012 survey, the most recent available, concluded employment had grown 1.1 per cent, to 1.33 million people, on par with the national growth rate and twice the rate of the province at that time.

One worrisome finding was that much of the job growth in Toronto in the past decade has been in part-time and precarious work, the study found.

While full-time jobs still made up nearly three-quarters of all jobs in the city, they grew just 5 per cent over the past decade. Part-time work rose 13 per cent during the same time period, according to the Toronto Employment Survey for 2012.

The most vibrant sector was in the downtown corridor, where a forest of new highrise condos and good-paying jobs in the financial industry, hospitals and education have been a magnet for job seekers.

The largest segment of Toronto’s labour market was in office jobs, accounting for nearly half of all jobs in the city in 2012, the city’s report found.

The manufacturing sector, meanwhile, had shrunk from Toronto’s second largest employer to its second smallest in the decade ending in 2012.

The fastest growing employer was in the “other” category — consisting mainly of jobs in the entertainment, community and recreation fields.