Canada’s much-touted labour shortage is mostly a mirage

CdnFox · June 1

Another clue that claims of a widespread labour shortages aren’t quite what they seem came in a Statistics Canada report last week that looked at job vacancies, which were 2½ times greater in 2022 than in 2016.

There were stark differences in the rates, depending on a job’s education requirement. For positions requiring at least a bachelor’s degree, there was no general labour shortage.

But there were a large number of vacancies for jobs that only required a high-school diploma, or less. For those lower-skilled jobs, there were many more vacancies than unemployed workers. Even if all those workers were instantly hired, there still would have been 131,000 vacancies in the fourth quarter of last year, for instance.

It doesn’t cost much to post a job electronically, and automatic sorting reduces the administrative burden dramatically. Some of those vacancies may be placeholders.

TL/DR - there does not seem to be a labour shortage when you get to jobs that require some certification or university skills. Unskilled labour jobs however are hugely unfilled. BUT - is that real? Employers are using temp workers instead and may be putting out 'fake' ads to either keep a supply of potential workers coming through the door or to swap out their weakest with better ones if one happens to apply.

It's an interesting take on it - maybe the so called 'labour shortage' isn't quite as short as we thought

impartialobserver · June 1

This may or may not be related but we try to get data about job postings and every time... it is a hot steaming pile of ____. So many issues with the data. The metric that we use is a derived one.. Max employment in a given area/industry and current employment in that area/industry.

Moonbox · June 1

Statistics Canada reports are not usually to be relied on for these sorts of things. Leading private/corp economists may look at the data, but they're always digging deeper. Statistics Canada is not the one to call a recession. Look at this:

TLDR of this chart is the outlook for corporate executives on whether they expect to be expanding and hiring in the near future vs the opposite. Green is good, red is bad, and if we're not in a recession already we probably will be soon.

That being said, it's probably going to be a really light one.

Edited June 1 by Moonbox