Canada's economy lost 84,000 jobs in February while the unemployment rate edged up to 6.7 per cent, Statistics Canada said on Friday, a setback for the labour market and one of the worst monthly job losses seen in years (new window) outside of the pandemic. Jobs mostly declined in the goods and services-producing industries, with 18,000 jobs lost in wholesale and retail trade, 12,000 lost in construction and 9,200 lost in manufacturing. Several indicators were more or less unchanged from the same time last year, including the unemployment rate (which sat at 6.6 per cent in Feb. 2025), the employment rate and the number of people working full-time or part-time. Katherine Judge, an executive director and senior economist at CIBC Capital Markets, said the labour market took a worrisome turn in February. The drop in jobs and the uptick in unemployment was in contrast to analyst expectations that the labour market would gain 10,000 jobs, she wrote, and that the unemployment rate would rise at a slower pace than it did.

Source: CBC News March 13, 2026 16:53 UTC