Canada's job market added nearly 23,000 jobs in December, but the unemployment rate stayed level at 7.1%.
Moreover, figures released Friday morning by Statistics Canada showed that Ontario was the only province to post a jobs increase. Everywhere else, the figure was either flat or declined.
Still, the strong figure was much better than the 10,000-job contraction analysts were expecting. December's figure brings the total number of new jobs in 2015 to 158,000.
The agency also says that, in addition to being concentrated almost entirely in one province, all the new jobs in December were of the self-employed or part-time variety. Economists generally believe those are lesser-quality jobs because they often initially come with much lower salaries.
Overall, the economy lost 6,400 full-time jobs during the month. The private sector lost 9,000 positions, while the public sector shed 8,400.
Those declines were offset by 29,200 part-time jobs and 40,300 more people classified as "self-employed," however, which goes a long way in explaining the overall growth. One of the few bright spots came in the manufacturing sector, which added 6,100 jobs.
