Vancouver and Toronto don’t just boast Canada’s hottest housing markets.

They can also boast the fact they alone represent all of the country’s employment gains, BMO Nesbitt Burns says.

“Yes, that means the rest of the country has created precisely no new jobs in the past year,” said BMO chief economist Douglas Porter.

“This is extremely unusual considering that these two cities account for 25 per cent of total employment in the country.”

As BMO noted in a separate report, British Columbia’s jobless rate is now the lowest in Canada, and at 5.8 per cent is well below the national average of 7.1 per cent.

That separate look by BMO senior economist Robert Kavcic found that Canada’s westernmost province accounted for 110,000 of the country’s 144,000 net new positions in the last year.

Ontario’s unemployment rate is still elevated, at 7 per cent, as is Toronto’s at 7.5 per cent.

But job creation in Toronto, and several nearby cities, is stronger.

“This simply highlights the extreme regional divergence that the Canadian economy is now seeing,” Mr. Porter said of Vancouver and Toronto.

“The strong job growth in these two cities at least partly explains the strength in their housing markets,” Mr. Porter added.