lorne gunter
toronto sun
Last month, Canada’s unemployment rate grew by three-tenths of a percentage point.
That might not sound like much, but it is the largest one-month jump since the worst months of the pandemic in late 2020 and early 2021.
Three-tenths is a big jump for one month. The November increase brings the overall rate to 6.8%, its highest level in seven years (not counting the trough during the pandemic).
Let’s put even more perspective on the bad jobs numbers from November.
There are now 1.5 million Canadians actively seeking work who are nonetheless jobless.
In April 2023, the unemployment rate was 5.1%, which means that in just the past 19 months — a little more than a year and a half — the rate has risen by 1.7 percentage points— a staggering one-third increase.
There were 87,000 more unemployed Canadians in November than in October and 276,000 more unemployed in November 2024 than in November 2023.
Canada added just over 329,000 jobs in the past 12 months. So, how come unemployment has risen so sharply? Because over the same year, the federal Liberals increased the number of immigrants it allowed into the country by 1.2 million. That means immigration is outstripping job growth by four to one.
You don’t have to be anti-immigration to see the fallacy of the Trudeau government’s policy. The Liberals may insist they are cutting way back on immigration, but so far they are still admitting about 100,000 newcomers per month.
Our economy, which is sluggish thanks to the Liberals’ anti-energy, anti-investment, anti-business and pro-tax policies will grow by under 1% this year. It would need to grow by closer to 4% to accommodate the number of immigrants, refugees, foreign students and temporary foreign workers the Liberals keep letting in.
Another inconvenient fact buried in the November job numbers: More than half of the new jobs created were in the public sector. Since public-sector jobs do not fund themselves, these government, hospital, school, university and other civil service jobs have to be underwritten by tax dollars or government borrowing, neither of which are sustainable sources of funding in the long term.
And while the rest of the country may love to hate Toronto, bad economic news for the country’s largest city is not good for Canada. And in November, Toronto got terrible economic news.
Last month, the unemployment rate in T.O. jumped from 7.5% to 9.2% — in one month!
And the news for the last year hasn’t been much better. In November last year, there were 258,500 unemployed in the Greater Toronto Area. This November, there were 379,900, an increase of 47% in just one year.
It is a puzzle how there can be any Liberal voters left in Toronto at all, yet there are. Toronto and Montreal remain the Liberals’ last two sort-of strongholds.
The most troubling aspect of all, though, may be that the Trudeau government seems to have no understanding of how its economic and immigration policies have created this mess, nor any understanding of how their increases in the size of government and the level of taxation are making it harder and harder for Canada’s economy to climb out of the hole they have dug.
Moreover, if their floodgate immigration policy leads to the incoming U.S. administration slapping a 25% tariff on goods from Canada, the Liberals’ mismanagement of the economy and immigration could land us in a recession or even a depression.
This is the dumbest, most incompetent government in my lifetime. The Liberals and New Democrats, who have propped up Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government for so long, need to be punished at the polls.
