January’s Labour Force Survey served up one of those reports that can’t decide whether to laugh or cry.
Employment shed almost 25,000 positions, virtually all of them part-time, and pretty much every one located in Ontario or inside a factory.
Yet the unemployment rate sank to 6.5%, not thanks to a hiring spree, but because nearly 120,000 people quietly vanished from the labour force. It was the largest non-pandemic decline since early 2022.
Wage growth decelerated further to about 3.3%, private-sector payrolls fell sharply, and manufacturing employment dropped to multi-year lows courtesy of the wrecking ball called tariffs.
Plenty of analysts blamed weather effects and statistical noise, but you can sum it up as job-market softness masked by collapsing labour supply.
Here's how the rate market may digest it.
