Statistics Canada's latest Job Vacancy Survey, for March, adds to the growing consensus that Canada has few broad labour-shortage problems, at least over the near-term horizon. But it hardly paints a picture of a robust market for the country's 1.3 million unemployed.
While labour demand has generally trended upward on a year-over-year basis (March demand was up 0.9 per cent from a year earlier), job vacancies have long been in decline. Three-month average vacancies in March were down by nearly 17,000 positions or 7.5 per cent from a year earlier; compared with mid-2012 levels, vacancies are down 25 per cent.
The job vacancy rate – vacancies as a percentage of total labour demand – has fallen from the 1.8-to-1.9-per-cent range in the middle of 2012 to 1.3-to-1.4-per-cent levels this year, the lowest levels in the (admittedly brief) three-year history of Statscan's Job Vacancy Survey. There are 6.8 unemployed Canadians for every job vacancy – a rate also near its highest level in the survey's history.
Contrary to Ottawa's claim in its February budget that we have large numbers of job openings and inadequate skills among our unemployed to fill them, it would appear we have been filling them – and now we've had our fill. The numbers are certainly not pointing to an unsated appetite for hiring.
That's not to say that, as many experts have suggested, there aren't pockets of the Canadian economy with shortages. Alberta's vacancy rate is 2.3 per cent, the highest in the country. But even in Alberta's notoriously hot labour market (it accounted for nearly 85 per cent of all job growth in Canada for the past year), the vacancy rate is down more than one full percentage point from 2012 levels. The rate in another supposedly tight labour market, Saskatchewan, is less than half of what it was two years ago.
The vacancy rate in a couple of skills-intensive sectors – construction (1.7 per cent) and professional, scientific and technical services (1.9 per cent) – are above the overall average, and construction vacancy rates have been rising recently. But the sector displaying the most persistent and rising shortages is accommodation and food services, where specialized skills are generally not at a premium. (Though this does explain the restaurant industry's outcry over Ottawa's suspension of its participation in the Temporary Foreign Worker program, especially in Alberta, where the sector's vacancy rate is running near 8 per cent.)
As many economists have lamented, the Statscan data still lack sufficiently granular detail to tell us if there are specific skill sets in specific municipalities where chronic and/or growing shortages prevail. The Job Vacancy Report can tell us, for instance, that Alberta is running a 3.2-per-cent vacancy rate in construction, but it can't tell us whether Fort McMurray needs more welders or crane operators.
But what we most certainly don't see in these numbers is evidence of growing shortages – nor, indeed, a very robust hiring environment at all. The numbers suggest demand growth may not be keeping up with the supply of available labour – not a great sign for the labour market, nor for wage growth, in the coming months.
David Parkinson