Canada: Unemployment Rate stays unchanged at 5% in April, payrolls rise by 41,400

Unemployment Rate in Canada held steady at 5% in April.
Net Change in Employment: 41,400 vs 20,000 expected.
USD/CAD rises above 1.3500 as US jobs numbers surpassed expectations.

Matías Salord FXStreet

The data published by Statistics Canada revealed on Friday that the Unemployment Rate stayed unchanged at 5% in April. This reading came in slightly better than the market expectation of 5.1%.

Further details of the publication revealed that the Net Change in Employment rose by 41,500, surpassing analysts' estimate of 20,000. The Participation Rate stay unchanged at 65.6% and the annual wage inflation remained at 5.2% in March.

Key takeaways from the report:

The unemployment rate was 5.0% in April, unchanged since December 2022.
Employment increased in wholesale and retail trade (+24,000; +0.8%); transportation and warehousing (+17,000; +1.6%); information, culture and recreation (+16,000; +1.9%); as well as in educational services (+15,000; +1.0%). Employment decreased in business, building and other support services (-14,000; -1.9%).
On a year-over-year basis, average hourly wages rose 5.2% (+$1.66 to $33.38) in April (not seasonally adjusted).
Employment rose by 41,000 (+0.2%) in April. Since February, monthly employment growth has averaged 33,000, following cumulative increases of 219,000 in December 2022 and January 2023.
Part-time employment increased by 48,000 (+1.3%) in April, while full-time employment held steady. This was the first notable increase in part-time work since October 2022.
Compared with 12 months earlier, the number of private sector employees rose by 299,000 (+2.3%) in April 2023, while there were 81,000 (+2.0%) more people working in the public sector.

Market reaction

The USD/CAD rose initially to 1.3505 after the jobs reports from Canada and the US, and then pulled back toward the 1.3490 area.

Author

Matías Salord

FXStreet

Matías started in financial markets in 2008, after graduating in Economics. He was trained in chart analysis and then became an educator. He also studied Journalism. He started writing analyses for specialized websites before joining FXStreet.

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