COVID-19 definitely had an impact on the Cariboo region’s unemployment rate, but it could have been much worse.
Vincent Ferrao is a Labour Market Analyst with Stats Canada…
“For the Cariboo region the unemployment rate was at 9.7 percent, compared to 6.2 percent a year ago, so it’s up 3.5 percentage points.”
The 9.7 percent is the highest the Cariboo region’s jobless rate has been since March of 2017 when it was an even 10 percent without COVID.
Ferrao says the region did lose 86-hundred jobs compared to a year ago however…
“The number of people who were working declined by 8,600. So we have 71,200 people working this April, compared with 79,800 a year ago. We had fewer people working in construction, and in natural resources, educational services, healthcare and social assistance.”
Ferrao says the number of people actually looking for work was up only 24-hundred though…
“We had employment falling and also labour force falling. In terms of the number of people who were unemployed looking for work, that number is 7,700. So 7,700 people were unemployed looking for work, compared with 53 hundred a year ago.”
That means that the actual unemployment number could be higher as some people may have given up looking for work during COVID.
BC’s unemployment rate was 11.5 percent last month.
That’s up from 5 percent in March.
Over 3-million people in Canada are currently out of work with the national rate now standing at 13%.
Here is the breakdown by province:
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- Prince Edward Island 10.8%
- Saskatchewan 11.3%
- Ontario 11.3%
- Manitoba 11.4%
- British Columbia 11.5%
- Nova Scotia 12.0%
- New Brunswick 13.2%
- Alberta 13.4%
- Newfoundland and Labrador 16.0%
- Quebec 17.0%
