TORONTO — Canada lost a record 129,000 jobs last month as the unemployment rate surged more than half a point to 7.2 percent, the single-worst monthly job loss figure in the country’s history.
The numbers are far worse than the 40,000 job losses economists expected and outpace losses in Canada’s two previous recessions in the 1980s and 1990s. Statistics Canada began taking a labor force survey in 1976.
Danielle Zietsma, a spokeswoman for Statistics Canada, said the agency does not have comparable data from before 1976 but said January’s figures are a record for the number of jobs lost in a month.
“Nobody was even looking for anything close to this,” said Craig Wright, chief economist at the Royal Bank of Canada.
Wright said the U.S. equivalent based on labor-market size would be 1.3 million jobs lost. He said that the U.S. labor market is about 10 times the size of Canada’s. The Associated Press
