THUNDER BAY – New data from Statistics Canada show Thunder Bay residents are feeling the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, with April's unemployment numbers just a hair short of record-breaking.
It’s a sobering picture: more than two million jobs were lost across Canada in April alone, bringing total job losses since the pandemic began to more than three million. Many workers also saw hours significantly reduced.
The unemployment rate now sits at 13 per cent nationally, a jump of over five points from March and seven points higher than it was a year ago.
Those are the second-worst jobless numbers since Statistics Canada began collecting comparable information in 1976. Only December of 1982 had higher unemployment at 13.1 per cent, following the 1981-1982 recession – but that record may soon be shattered, only a tenth of a per cent above April's rate.
The jump is reflected in Statistics Canada's latest figures for Thunder Bay, but the local picture is less clear. The agency presents its metropolitan unemployment figures using a three-month rolling average due to smaller local sampling sizes, obscuring the immediate impact of the COVID-19 crisis.
That three-month average shows the city’s unemployment rate jumping from 6.1 per cent in March to 8.3 per cent in April. That’s about 2.4 per cent higher than April of 2019, and would represent about 5,200 people out of work.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly compared local and national unemployment data from Statistics Canada, suggesting Thunder Bay's unemployment rate had been less affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been updated to reflect that the Thunder Bay unemployment rate is calculated differently from the national figure, using a three-month rolling average. Tbnewswatch apologizes for the error.
