For the second month in a row, Statistics Canada has announced employment data that are wildly out of line with market expectations. The agency reported today that the economy lost 11,000 jobs in August, as opposed to analysts' consensus forecast of a 10,000-job increase.
The details of the data are puzzling a lot of the experts, with at least one bank's economists calling the report "fishy". Specifically, StatsCan claims that the number of private sector jobs fell by 111,800 in the month, the largest decline ever recorded. In the absence of any large layoff announcements in recent months, this looks improbable, at the very least. Meantime, the number of Canadians who are self-employed supposedly jumped by 87,000 in August, which is also an all-time record for a single month.
After the release of its July employment report, StatsCan was forced into a hasty retreat when it realized that the numbers were wrong. It subsequently issued a much-revised set of numbers, blaming human error. The same thing surely couldn't have happened again in August, could it? You wouldn't think so, but today's data are again so counter-intuitive that the possibility can't be ruled out.
In any event, US non-farm payrolls data were also released today and showed that the American economy added 142,000 jobs in the month. Even if the Canadian data had been in line with the market consensus, that would mean that the Canadian economy is still underperforming its larger neighbor in creating jobs. At the end of the day, that's more significant than any snafus in StatsCan's data collection methods.
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