The national unemployment rate ticked up to 6.9 percent in April as the manufacturing sector started to strain under the weight of tariffs from the United States, Statistics Canada said Friday.
The Canadian economy added 7,400 jobs last month, the agency said, slightly outpacing economist expectations for a gain of 2,500 positions.
But the unemployment rate also rose two tenths of a percentage point in April, topping economists’ call for a jobless rate of 6.8 percent.
At 6.9 percent, the unemployment rate is back at its recent high seen in November. Before then, the jobless rate had not hit that level since January 2017, outside the pandemic years.
While the economy did add jobs in April, the rising unemployment rate suggests employers were not hiring as quickly as Canada’s population was growing.
StatCan noted that’s a reversal of earlier this year, when strong employment gains coincided with slowing population growth.
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Canada’s manufacturing industry led job losses in April, shedding 31,000 positions, with the bulk of the impact in Ontario.
The hit comes after the United States imposed tariffs starting in March on non-CUSMA compliant imports from Canada as well as sector-specific levies on steel and aluminum and automobiles.
Manufacturing-heavy Windsor, Ont., saw its unemployment rate jump 1.4 percentage points to 10.7 percent last month, StatCan said.
The agency said the April figures show the first significant decline in manufacturing jobs since November, though employment levels for the industry remain steady year-over-year.
The wholesale and retail trade sector also lost some 27,000 jobs in April.
Offsetting the declines last month was a gain of 37,000 jobs in public administration, which StatCan said was largely temporary work tied to April’s federal election.
Average hourly wages rose 3.4 percent in April, down slightly from 3.6 percent in March.
Despite economic uncertainty tied to the U.S. trade dispute, most workers were telling StatCan they felt secure in their jobs.
Some 73.9 percent of workers aged 15-69 disagreed when asked if they thought they’d lose their job in the next six months, though the proportion of those who felt otherwise was highest in industries reliant on exports to the United States.
