2025 jobs numbers mask uncertainty, growing disparities: economist

Numbers mask uncertainty

Photo: The Canadian Press

Canada's unemployment rate increased in December, while Kelowna's and Kamloops' decreased.

At first glance, economist Kaylie Tiessen said, the new 2025 jobs numbers from Statistics Canada look unremarkable.

In December, the unemployment rate hit 6.8 per cent — up from 6.5 per cent the month prior but down from August highs of 7.1 per cent. Overall, employment in Canada grew by about one per cent compared with 2024.

“You could be forgiven for thinking, with the top-line numbers, that it was kind of a ‘blah’ year for workers across Canada,” said Tiessen, chief economist for the Canadian SHIELD Institute.

“But those overarching talking points mask a significant amount of turmoil under the surface.”

When she broke down the data by different provinces, age groups and genders, Tiessen said significant disparities started to emerge.

Meanwhile, an increase in the number of part-time jobs in B.C. and Canadians holding multiple jobs at once hints that both employers and workers are uncertain about the economy.

“Part-time jobs usually result in lower incomes, and so income insecurity and financial insecurity are the kind of things that we’d worry about going forward,” said Iglika Ivanova, economist and co-executive director at BC Policy Solutions.

“There’s not one story in the labour market; there are many,” she said. “How you feel likely depends on what’s happening in your household.”

On Friday, Statistics Canada released its monthly labour force survey data for December and annual jobs data for the whole year.

It’s the agency’s first release painting the whole picture of Canada’s job market during 2025, a year defined by uncertainty over U.S. tariffs and fears of an economic recession.

Photo: The Tyee

Employed workers in Canada.

In December, Canada’s economy added 8,200 jobs despite a 0.3 per cent month-over-month jump in the unemployment rate, bucking analyst expectations. Economists polled by Reuters thought the country would instead lose 5,000 jobs last month.

“Thinking about this time last year, when Donald Trump was swearing in as United States president, it was so hard to predict,” Ivanova said. “The economy, in general, performed better than was expected — or feared — but that doesn’t mean that people are seeing improvements.”

Ivanova said that housing and affordability issues persisting despite jobs numbers slightly increasing is a sign that wages and compensation aren’t keeping up with affordability.

“That’s what we need to be worrying about or monitoring, is that gap in economic security,” she said.

Here in B.C., 32,000 more jobs were created in 2025 than in 2024. Approximately 60 per cent — 19,000 — of those jobs were part time.

Nationally, the number of people holding multiple jobs also rose to a 10-year high of 1,178,600 during 2025.

The SHIELD institute’s Tiessen said the part-time jobs numbers and multiple jobs numbers indicate “that there is some precarity and insecurity.”

“We should be noticing that employers are hiring, but they’re also feeling uncertain about the future,” she said.

Photo: The Tyee

Multiple job holders in Canada

Tiessen said that for workers over the age of 25, employment rose slightly faster for women than for men at the end of 2025.

Between December 2024 and December 2025, approximately 114,000 more women over the age of 25 were employed, with about 104,000 of those jobs being full time.

Meanwhile, for the 67,000 more men that age who gained employment over the same time period, about 59,000 of those new jobs were part time.

She added more research is needed to understand why.

Canadian youth continue to face a tough job market. The annual unemployment rate for workers aged 15 to 24 reached 13.8 per cent last year, up from 13.1 per cent in 2024. Tiessen noted that in recent years, younger workers have seen unemployment rise far faster than other age groups.

She said it’s unclear if young workers’ job market challenges will persist as teens and young adults start looking for jobs during the summer.

“Economists tend to focus on those high-level numbers to be able to say generally that the economy is fine,” Tiessen said. “But in fact, there are microcosms of experiences in different cities and provinces that display something quite different.”