Winnipeg job market among country’s best: report

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Sears employees soon to be out of work can take heart in a newly released BMO report that lists Winnipeg as one of the best places in Canada to find work.

In its latest quarterly Regional Labour Market Report Card, BMO Capital Markets ranked the labour market performance of 33 Canadian cities.

Winnipeg was the only city outside of Ontario or British Columbia to crack the top 10 best performers list.

It jumped 17 spots in the past year to claim fourth place behind Kelowna, Hamilton and Kitchener.

Robert Kavcic, senior economist for BMO Capital Markets, admitted in an interview he was a bit surprised by Winnipeg’s leap in the rankings.

“It’s not something you usually see in that market. Traditionally it’s one of the most stable markets in Canada, no matter what measure you look at — the jobless rate, economic growth, or whatever,” he said.

He agreed Winnipeg’s high ranking probably could bode well for the hundreds of local Sears Canada employees who will be losing their jobs over the next few months as the financially troubled department store chain winds down its operations and closes its 130 remaining stores, which includes three outlets in Winnipeg.

“But those (retail) jobs tend to get absorbed within the sector a lot of the time, too,” he added.

“We’ve seen it in past cases like Target, for example. You get a blip in unemployment for a while, but then they ultimately get absorbed in other areas of retail.”

The BMO report said it was Winnipeg’s job growth over the past year that helped to propel it upwards in the labour-market-performance rankings.

Kavcic noted Winnipeg had a net gain of about 11,000 new jobs over the past year, for an employment growth rate of 2.6 per cent.

“That’s very solid,” he added.

He said two sectors that showed healthy job gains were construction and finance.

The manufacturing sector, which is one of the economy’s biggest employers, saw little change in its employment levels.

The job gains also helped drive down Winnipeg’s unemployment rate from a 15- to 20-year high of 6.9 per cent in November of last year to 5.5 per cent in September of this year.

That’s well below the national jobless rate of 6.2 per cent, which is at a nine-year low.

Kavcic said he suspects part of the reason Winnipeg’s unemployment rate climbed so high last year was because a lot of the Manitoba workers who were temporarily working in the Alberta oilpatch lost their jobs when prices collapsed and production plummeted.

Because many of those workers still listed Manitoba as their primary place of residence, they would have been added to Manitoba’s unemployment numbers, rather than Alberta’s.

That would drive up Winnipeg’s and Manitoba’s jobless rates, he said, even though the layoffs didn’t happen here.

“But that (the number of unemployed workers) has started to come down now as the (oil) sector has stabilized,” he added.

Kavcic said while Winnipeg is one of the better places to find work right now, the job prospects here still aren’t as strong as in the Greater Toronto and Greater Vancouver areas.

“If you just look at the kind of job growth and economic growth that part of the country (Manitoba) is turning out, versus Ontario and B.C. right now, it’s still a pretty significant step slower,” he said.

The report notes Ontario posted one of the strongest three-month job growth rates on record in the third quarter of this year, adding 91,000 new jobs.

And British Columbia led the provinces in employment growth over the past year, at 3.6 per cent.

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca