Canadian job vacancies continue climbing to new record heights in June

Statistics Canada recently released its monthly update on payroll employment, earnings and hours, and job vacancies for June 2022.

The job vacancies portion of this update revealed that Canada had over 1,000,000 job vacancies in May of this year.

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The number of vacancies continues to climb to record heights

Job vacancies in Canada are up 3.2% over the last month (between May and June 2022), with 32,200 more jobs available across the country.

This makes for three consecutive months where Canada’s total number of job vacancies has exceeded 1 million.

With June’s job vacancy rate coming in at 5.9%—up 1% from June of last year and matching a record-high set in September 2021—a greater proportion of Canada’s total labour demand (the sum of filled and vacant job positions, which clocked in at 17.7 million in June) is made up of unfilled jobs.

Health care and social assistance sector experiencing a job vacancy rate of over 6%

Job vacancies in the health care and social assistance sector are up 40.8% since June of last year. In other words, this employment sector had 149,700 unfilled jobs in June and a job vacancy rate of 6.3%, which is 0.4% higher than the total job vacancy rate across the country.

Other sectors with notable job vacancies: accommodation and food; retail trade

Faring worse than health care and social assistance, the accommodation and food sector saw 171,700 job vacancies in June, an increase of 6.6% since StatsCan’s May update and 38.8% year-over-year. The total job vacancy rate in this sector totalled 12.2 during this period.

The retail trade sector saw 15,200 more job vacancies since May, meaning that 15.3% more jobs became available for prospective employees. Vacancies in the retail trade industry have gone up 22.5% since June 2021, totalling 114,400 open and available positions—equating to a job vacancy rate of 5.4%.

Quick numbers regarding job vacancies in more employment sectors

Here are some quick stats about the state of job vacancies in five other key Canadian job industries for June 2022.

Construction: 89,200 job vacancies

Manufacturing: 82,800 job vacancies

Professional, scientific, and technical services: 72,200 job vacancies

Transportation and warehousing: 49,000 job vacancies

Finance and insurance: 41,200 job vacancies

What does this all mean?

The conclusions we can gather from Statistics Canada’s latest report on job vacancies in Canada include the fact that, across the country, “the unemployment-to-job-vacancy ratio reached a record low of 1.0 in June, meaning that there was one unemployed person for each vacant job.”

While that ratio covers the country generally, it is also notable that four provinces had an unemployment-to-job-vacancy ratio below one (1.0) in June. Those provinces were Quebec (0.6), British Columbia (0.7), Saskatchewan (0.8), and Manitoba (0.9). On the flip side, at 2.7, Newfoundland and Labrador experienced the highest ratio of any province during this reporting period.

The Canada-wide unemployment-to-job-vacancy ratio was almost double what it is now (officially, it was 1.9) in June 2021, a reality that aligns with the one particularly crucial finding in this report—unemployment continues to decrease all over Canada as job vacancies rise across the country.

In order to solve this problem, Canada will look to immigration as one method to add to the country’s workforce, with the government aiming to invite its largest-ever number of prospective permanent residents between now and 2024 (including annual targets ranging from 430,000 to over 450,000).

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