The year over year unemployment rate in the Cariboo region dropped by one full percentage point to close out 2018.
Vincent Ferro, a Labour Market Analyst with Stats Canada, says the jobless rate was 5.3 percent last month, which was down from 6.3 a year ago in December of 2017.
But Ferro says the main reason for the decline was that fewer people were actually participating in the workforce…
“So that’s the unemployment rate 5-3. That represents 42-hundred people who are looking for work and a year ago when it was 6.3 percent, there were 54-hundred people looking for work. In terms of number of people who are working, we have 75,100 people working this December and that’s a decline. Last year at the same time we had 80,200 people employed.
Ferro says the biggest decline was in retail and wholesale trade.
He says there was a slight increase in the number of people working in manufacturing.
Canada’s jobless rate is 5.6%.
BC continues to have the lowest unemployment rate in the country at 4.4%.