Quebec's labor market remains “strong” in 2023

Quebec's labor market remains “robust” in 2023 despite an economic slowdown, according to data compiled by the Institut du Québec (IDQ).

“There was still a net creation of 67,000 jobs in Quebec (in 2023),” IDQ director Emna Braham said. “We are no longer at the level of post-pandemic catch-up, but we are still at a level of job creation close to what it was before the pandemic, between 2016 and 2019, when the Quebec economy took a turn for the worse. it was going well.”

According to the IDQ report, despite high inflation, workers on average have maintained their purchasing power, which Braham says people are asking more about.

Average hourly wages were $33.02 in December 2023, compared to $31.87 in December 2019 before the pandemic.

“At the end of the day, the inflation we experienced at the end of the pandemic didn't completely eat away at what workers were earning,” he said.

2023 was a break in the creation of “quality jobs”, and most of the new jobs are part-time.

The trend toward good-paying job creation seen at the end of the pandemic will weaken in 2023, the report said.

However, in December, the share of well-paying jobs in the overall labor market (48 percent) remained higher than before the pandemic (45 percent).

The economic slowdown caused by rising interest rates has led to job cuts.

In one year, the number of vacant jobs decreased from 211 thousand to 149 thousand.

Also, the unemployment rate increased slightly from 4.1 percent to 4.7 percent between December 2022 and December 2023.

The situation varies by industry, with the health care and construction sectors experiencing labor shortages.

In addition, the financial, insurance and real estate services sector had only 13,000 fewer workers at the end of the year.

An increase in the working-age population due to immigration helped to eliminate the labor shortage.

“We've seen that workforce grow significantly in the last year, by about 100,000 more people,” explains Braham. “This increase was largely due to temporary immigration over the past year.”

The economic downturn hit permanent immigrants hard, with the unemployment rate rising from 4.7 percent to 7.5 percent between December 2022 and December 2023.

In contrast, the Canadian-born saw the unemployment rate rise from 3.5 percent to 3.7 percent.

The unemployment rate for permanent immigrants remains relatively low compared to more than 10 percent a decade ago, but Braham said the trend remains “alarming.”

“What we've seen is that the trend has really been to narrow the gap in the unemployment rate between immigrants and the Canadian-born in recent years. But there we actually saw an increase in the unemployment rate for permanent immigrants.”

This report from La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews.