The past six months have been little short of stellar for Canadian job growth, with the country adding 174,000 jobs, well above population growth, and reversing an earlier trend towards part-time work.

But there’s a flipside to this economic good news: The job growth is coming at the price of wage gains.

The average hourly wage in Canada in March was $26.12, up 1.1 per cent from a year earlier. That’s the weakest wage growth the country has seen since July of 1998.

Adjusted for inflation, the average wage in Canada is about 1 per cent lower today than a year ago.