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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Manitoba records loss of 3,400 jobs in October

By: Murray McNeill

7/11/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

MANITOBA lost several thousand more jobs last month, prompting one local economist to forecast a slow and painful economic recovery for the province."This is a jobless recovery, that's what this is," John McCallum, an economics professor at the University of Manitoba, said in an interview Friday. "So I think it's going to be tough for a while."

McCallum was commenting after Statistics Canada issued the results of its October labour force survey.

They showed the Manitoba economy shed another 3,400 jobs during the month, which pushed up the provincial unemployment rate to 5.8 per cent from 5.3 per cent in September.

That, coupled with 2,400 positions that were lost in September, means 5,800 jobs have vanished from the provincial economy in the last two months, McCallum said.

And he doesn't see them coming back any time soon.

"All of those people who had to let people go (during the recession) are going to want to see some really sustained growth in their operations before they recommit (to adding more workers)," he said. "So this has a long way to go."

However, Manitoba's chief statistician downplayed the significance of the latest employment numbers.

"I think he (McCallum) is reading way too much into the data," Wilf Falk said in an interview.

Falk said StatsCan's labour force numbers for Manitoba tend to bounce around a lot from one month to the next. He prefers to focus on year-to-date data, which show that over the first 10 months of this year, Manitoba was one of the country's best performers in terms of employment growth in full-time jobs, and labour force growth.

And while it also posted a decline in the number of hours worked, the decline here was only about one-third the national decline (1.6 per cent versus 4.6 per cent). "I think our economy is doing relatively well," he said.

"So let's wait until next month. If we see another loss of jobs then, OK, maybe that's evidence that something is going on."

-- with files from The Canadian Press

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 7, 2009 B8

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