There's a new and welcome hint of improvement in Canada's job market. It has been stagnating for the past few months, interrupting the downtrend in unemployment we've enjoyed for most of the past two years.
Indeed, with employment growth no longer exceeding the number of new job-seekers entering the labour force, the unemployment rate actually rose to 7.4% last month from its September low of 7.1%, casting a pall of gloom over the job market.
But that could be a temporary phenomenon, suggests a new survey of hiring intentions. The survey, carried out among 1,900 Canadian employers by Manpower, the big temporary help agency, suggests that in spite of weak consumer and business confidence, employment conditions should be improving a little.
This is a message that must be taken with a grain of salt, despite the big size of the survey, however, because it's only a measure of expectations, not hard data about how much hiring will actually happen. Still, it's encouraging, said economist Michael Gregory, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets.
While job creation in Canada has ground to a dead halt in the past three months, the resilience of hiring intentions suggests to Gregory that we can hope to see the new year bring a resumption of modest employment gains, perhaps fending off any additional rise in unemployment.
The Manpower survey is structured in a way that subtracts the percentage of employers who plan to cut employment from the percentage who plan to add new jobs. Thus any net result bigger than zero suggests some expansion in employment.
The new survey, which asks for hiring intentions in the first quarter of 2012, yielded a positive number of 15%. This is after adjustment for seasonal factors like winter's construction slowdown. That number is up from a positive 13% for the fourth quarter of this year.
Of course, it's hard to match the results of this survey to any precise change in employment, since employers' intentions can change very quickly. That's especially true in today's environment of seemingly unending government financial crises in the U.S. and Europe.
For example, while we still don't know what the actual job growth will be for the fourth quarter, we do know that the three months ended in November actually showed a tiny drop in employment of about 12,000.
That's not quite as bad as it sounds, partly because monthly job numbers in Canada are not only very volatile, but are approximate at best. Statistics Canada warns that any given month's gain or loss could be off by as much as 29,000.
As well, the best jobs -- fulltime ones -- have continued to show modest growth of about 27,000 in the past three months, with all of the net job loss coming in part-time employment.
So we're not really sure whether the fourth quarter will finally show job growth or job loss, but we do know that employers seem a little more optimistic now than they were just before the fourth quarter began.
Tempering this, however, Byrne Luft, a Manpower vicepresident based in Toronto, warns that even though employers in the aggregate plan to boost employment a bit, many said they'll be cautious about hiring decisions, apparently because they're feeling uncertainty about how strong demand will be.
One of the brightest spots in the Canadian outlook is the auto industry, Luft said. It's being boosted by robust demand all over North America, helping to make durablegoods manufacturing the strongest single sector in the first-quarter outlook.
But the hiring outlook is reasonably good across the board, with every one of the 10 Canadian sectors tracked by Manpower showing positive hiring intentions.
Internationally, Canada's employment outlook is holding up better than those in most of the 41 countries tracked by Manpower, Luft said. It's one of just 10 countries to be showing some strengthening in hiring intentions for the first quarter.
Also encouraging, Canada's biggest export market, the U.S., is another country on this short list of countries with the potential to see improving job market conditions.
