It obviously isn’t all bad news.
In fact, under the circumstances of being in another recession and the continued fall in oil prices, Saskatchewan’s August job numbers weren’t quite as bad as some thought they would be.
But it clearly isn’t the good news that Premier Brad Wall government was hoping for.
And in rural Saskatchewan – where people tend to be a little closer to the resource economy and good jobs like those in the oil sector are not easy to find – the latest job news may be especially discouraging.
Even with harder times hitting the oilpatch, the number of Saskatchewan people working actually increased by 1,600 from last year to an all-time high of 587,700.
Moreover, Saskatchewan’s unemployment rate – although it increased slightly to 4.7 per cent compared with a year ago – remained the lowest in Canada. By comparison, Manitoba’s rate was 5.7 per cent and Alberta and B.C. were both at six per cent.
However, that appears to be where the good news ends. The province’s foremost statistician – Doug Elliott of Sask Trends Monitor – told the LeaderPost that the employment picture was “spotty.”
While there were new jobs, there was also 37,000 unemployed people – Saskatchewan’s highest unemployment number in more than 20 years.
It’s quite possible that many of these unemployed might be former well-paid oil workers. This seems to be what we learned in a series of stories from the LeaderPost reporter Emma Grainey on the WeyburnEstevan area, where a once all-too-low vacancy rate has suddenly become all too high.
Of course, there is the likelihood that oil will rebound at some point. As all too many in this industry have learned that this is a cyclical business.
Premier Brad Wall points out that Saskatchewan doesn’t seem to be taking quite as big a hit as Alberta. And if we are still creating jobs in the province, we can stand on our own without oil, right?
Well, it’s never quite that simple.
Where job growth in Saskatchewan seems to be at its best is in part-time work and in areas such as accommodation and food services. These tend to be low-paying and part-time work. Moreover, the other areas of year-over-year job growth included health care and social services (7,300 more jobs). These are public sector jobs that aren’t necessarily a sign of a healthy economy.
However, the real telling number is the number of full-time jobs. Full-time work actually fell in August by 10,600 jobs as compared with August 2014.
Even more telling is the contrast with Alberta that managed to create 43,000 more full-time jobs. Leading in Saskatchewan’s job loss category was resource development, but jobs were also lost in agriculture, construction and manufacturing.
If it were a good crop year going into harvest, one wouldn’t expect much of a loss in farming jobs. And with all the money the government has poured into construction – going into debt by an extra $700 million in this budget year alone – it’s more than a little surprising that the province is losing jobs in construction.
Finally, a weaker Canadian dollar should at least be good for Saskatchewan’s manufacturing sector. Evidently, that is not the case. It’s not all bad news on the job front for the Wall government.
And the bad news should be properly placed in the perspective that these are just one month’s employment statistics. They may change by next month.
We have yet to see prolonged job loss under the Wall government and there seems little to worry about until we do.
That said, with an election now only seven months away, it would be a bad time for Wall to enter a job slump.
And while we aren’t in that job slump yet, we are getting closer to it.
