REVscene Automotive Forum - We're No. 1: B.C. leads the way as 61,300 jobs lost across Canada in March

British Columbia posted the worst job losses in Canada last month, shedding 23,000 jobs and pushing the province’s unemployment rate up to 7.4 per cent, Statistics Canada reported Thursday.

The biggest job losses were in construction, the financial sector and manufacturing, following on sharp declines that B.C. has seen in housing sales, housing starts, and investment in non-residential construction.

Canada as a whole shed 61,300 jobs in March, which pushed the unemployment rate to a seven-year high of eight per cent, up from 7.7 per cent in February.

“We’re well into [the recession], is one way to put it,” Helmut Pastrick, chief economist for Central 1 Credit Union, said in an interview.

“It's hard to know whether we’re halfway through, a quarter of the way through, or three-quarters of the way through. I suspect we have a few more months to go.”

Pastrick said the typical pattern of a recession sees consumers and businesses cut back on their spending on big-ticket items such as housing and large consumer items first.

Then companies start to lay off employees as as orders decline and inventories rise. Typically, Pastrick said job losses lag behind the contraction of demand in the economy by about three to six months.

Pastrick said we will have to see demand, orders for new goods, and housing starts rise for a number of months before employment picks up again.

Signals on that front are still somewhat mixed.

Housing starts for the first quarter of 2009, reported by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. on Wednesday, showed new-home construction down some 70 per cent, which doesn’t bode well for the construction sector in the near term.

On Monday, Statistics Canada reported that building permits for February had surged after several months of decline, something that will eventually spur higher construction activity.

Another negative note was the March business conditions survey conducted by Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, in which 69 per cent of B.C. members reported fewer orders in the current quarter than the previous quarter, and 66 per cent expected orders over the next quarter to be down again.

Ken Peacock, director of economic research for the Business Council of B.C., said there are few indicators pointing to a quick turnaround, and that it is likely B.C. will continue to see job losses, although “hopefully not as steep and dramatic as the past five or six months.”

Some sectors, such as B.C.’s forest industry, which has been hammered by the collapse of U.S. housing construction, have already endured the worst.

“Just because employment is continuing to fall quickly doesn’t mean the worst is ahead of us,” Peacock said. “In fact, it means the worst is probably behind us.”

Predicting a turnaround for this recession, Peacock said, is a much more difficult task because its cause — the global financial meltdown — is unprecedented and so widespread. He said the slide into global recession is the steepest since the Second World War.

Statistics Canada reported that B.C.’s construction sector lost about 16,000 jobs in March, bringing the overall workforce to 187,800. The construction workforce peaked last September at 235,300, according to Statistics Canada data.

“Obviously, the construction industry is going through the declining side of its cycle,” said Keith Sashaw, president of the Vancouver Regional Construction Association. He expected more job losses in the future.

However, the February upswing in building permits suggests to Sashaw that B.C. might be near the bottom of the cycle.

“At the bottom, you do see volatility in terms of ups and downs [in building-permit numbers],” he said.

B.C.’s manufacturing sector shed 6,600 jobs in March, which Craig Williams, B.C. vice-president of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, said wasn’t as bad as January when the sector saw 20,000 jobs disappear, or about 10 per cent of its workforce.

But Williams said that sector too is seeing some “glimmers of hope,” with some firms bringing production back to B.C. that previously had been subcontracted to offshore suppliers. He said other firms are working through their inventories.

“I’m saying it’s not as pessimistic as it was a couple of months ago,” Williams said. “Some would argue we’re not going to hit the bottom until later this year or early next year.”

Unemployment rate (highest to lowest) in March by province:

• Newfoundland and Labrador: 14.7%

• Prince Edward Island: 11.5%

• New Brunswick: 9.5%

• Nova Scotia: 8.9%

• Ontario: 8.7%

• Quebec: 8.3%

• British Columbia: 7.4%

• Alberta: 5.8%

• Manitoba: 5.1%

• Saskatchewan: 4.7%
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