A snapshot of job vacancies across Canada for June 2022.
Statistics Canada recently released their monthly update on payroll employment, earnings and hours, and job vacancies for June 2022.
The job vacancies portion of this update showed that Canada had over 1,000,000 job vacancies in May of this year.
Number of vacancies continues to climb to record highs
Job vacancies in Canada increased by 3.2% compared to the previous month (between May and June 2022), with 32,200 more jobs available nationwide.
This makes for three consecutive months where Canada’s total number of vacancies has exceeded 1 million.
The June job vacancy rate is coming in at 5.9% – 1% from last year’s June and corresponds to the record-high set in September 2021 – a large proportion of Canada’s total labor demand (the sum of filled and vacant job positions, which saw in 17.7 million in June) made up of unfinished jobs.
The health care and social support sector is experiencing a job vacancy rate of over 6%
Job vacancies in the health care and social assistance sector are up 40.8% from June last year. In other words, this employment sector had 149,700 unfilled jobs in June and the job vacancy rate was 6.3%, which is 0.4% higher than the overall job vacancy rate across the country.
Other sectors with notable job vacancies: housing and food; retail business
Worse than health care and social support, the housing and food sector saw 171,700 job vacancies in June, a 6.6% increase since Statscan’s May update and a 38.8% year-on-year increase. The overall job vacancy rate in this sector during this period was 12.2.
The retail business sector saw 15,200 more job vacancies since May, meaning 15.3% more jobs became available for potential employees. Vacancies in the retail trade industry have increased by 22.5% since June 2021, with a total of 114,400 open and available positions – which equates to a job vacancy rate of 5.4%.
Quick numbers regarding job vacancies in more employable sectors
Here are some quick statistics about the status of job vacancies in five other major Canadian job industries for June 2022.
Construction: 89,200 Job Vacancies
Construction: 82,800 Job Vacancies
Professional, Scientific and Technical Services: 72,200 Job Vacancies
Transport & Storage: 49,000 Job Vacancies
Finance & Insurance: 41,200 Job Vacancies
What does all this mean?
The conclusions we can draw from Statistics Canada’s latest report on job vacancies in Canada include the fact that, nationwide, “the unemployment-to-job-vacancy ratio hit a record low of 1.0 in June.” , which means there was one unemployed person for each vacant job.”
While this ratio generally covers the country, it is also notable that the unemployment-to-jobs-vacancies ratio was less than one (1.0) in June in four provinces. Those provinces were Quebec (0.6), British Columbia (0.7), Saskatchewan (0.8), and Manitoba (0.9). On the other hand, at 2.7, Newfoundland and Labrador experienced the highest proportion of any province during this reporting period.
The Canada-wide unemployment-to-job-vacancies ratio nearly doubled in June 2021 (officially, it was 1.9), a reality that aligns with a particularly important finding in this report – unemployment continues to decline. As job vacancies in Canada have increased across the country.
To address this problem, Canada will look to immigration as a method to add to the country’s workforce, with the government aiming to invite the largest number of potential permanent residents between now and 2024 (with more than 430,000 annually). Targets include 450,000).