Commuters in Toronto’s financial district. Soft skills that so many white-collar workers have been told for years are critical to career progress appear less so now.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
John Turley-Ewart is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail, a regulatory compliance consultant and a Canadian banking historian.
Butchers, bakers and probably even candlestick makers share a common good fortune in Canada – the number of job opportunities for them have grown over the last 30 days. So too have openings for cashiers, sales support and cleaners.
Hard skills employers are seeking in greater numbers include lifting ability, restaurant operation, food safety and inventory management, and there has even been a small bump in the demand for constructions skills.
This is the only good news to be gleaned from the not-for-profit Labour Market Information Council’s (LMIC) current data on Canadian job trends. LMIC’s labour market dashboard, reflecting trends using online job postings, paints a less rosy picture of the demand for white-collar workers. We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to it.
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February’s job numbers in Canada were stark. Eighty-four thousand Canadians lost work. Analysts had expected to see an addition of ten thousand. The unemployment rate bumped up to 6.7 per cent from 6.5 in January.
Twenty-seven thousand Canadians gave up and dropped out of the labour market. The country has seen all the job gains from last September wiped out.
The bulk of the job losses, 108,000, was experienced by full-time workers, with most of those workers coming from the private sector (73,000). Jobless white-collar workers are finding it harder to return to the work force.
LMIC’s dashboard shows a precipitous drop in demand for occupational skills that a few years ago would be hard to imagine. Job openings for computer, software and web designers and developers, meanwhile, are down almost 18 per cent as of March 31.
Roles for auditors, accountants and investment professionals are also off by nearly 18 per cent. Human resources and business service professionals haven’t been spared; demand for their skills fell by 13 per cent.
Soft skills that so many white-collar workers have been told for years are critical to career progress appear less so now. Jobs listing problem-solving abilities have dropped by about 9 per cent and innovation by about 11, teamwork is down eight, leadership off seven and communication by six.
Abilities that once made the difference between being hired or passed over are losing relevance. Jobs calling for French-language skills? Down by roughly 13 per cent. Writing skills? About 11 per cent down, nearly the same as the fall in demand for Microsoft Excel skills.
We can point to causes beyond our control if it makes us feel better. U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the uncertainty they have caused are factors. Companies, large and small, starting to implement AI, aren’t helping. And soon, if the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran isn’t settled, the oil-price shock will surely be pointed to.
Such is the economic noise, whereas the signal is what we need to discern. Our economic heartbeat has been fading for more than a decade.
The signs of decline are numerous. Canada’s bank regulator, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, redlines bank loans to small and medium-sized businesses. The policy is so wrong-headed that even the CEO of National Bank of Canada, Laurent Ferreira, has called it out.
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There are federal and provincial governments that stand idle while the country’s corporate tax structure becomes increasingly uncompetitive and complex. So much so that “in the last decade every metric in this area has been moving in the wrong direction,” according to corporate tax expert Kim G. C. Moody.
Our federal and provincial governments prefer handing out subsidies like patronage rather than supporting tax regimes that allow businesses to compete on economic fundamentals.
We are by choice driving Canadians to start businesses elsewhere, largely the United States and the European Union. At home we have adopted policies that throw cold water on the entrepreneurial fire that drives development. Self-employment in Canada is crashing. Mr. Moody concludes: “Something is deeply wrong with Canada’s economy.”
Immigrants are alive to the signals. Twenty per cent leave this country within 25 years, research by the Institute for Canadian Citizenship shows. The more educated or skilled the immigrant, the faster they pull the chute for greener pastures somewhere else.
Many born here recognize it too. Canadian-born immigrants to the U.S numbered over 800,000 in 2023.
Last week Statistics Canada released a research report that concluded “regardless of the measure selected, Canada’s economic performance has not kept pace with the United States” and that “the relative decline in productivity growth is the principal reason why.”
The Canadian project’s success depends on delivering the opportunity for a better quality of life than the republic to the south. Jobs for butchers, bakers and candlestick makers won’t cut it.