In August 2022, Statistics Canada published payroll employment, earnings, and hours along with jobs in healthcare and social assistance.
As well as counting how many workers are currently being paid in Canada’s labor force, this report also contains the amount they earn and the number of hours they put in.
Moreover, the report tracks open positions, which are any positions that were previously filled by employees but are now unfilled for any reason.
According to Statistics Canada, 958,500 payroll employment positions were open in August of last year. Compared to July, August 2021’s statistics showed a significant increase, with 919,200 job openings.
Job vacancies in healthcare reach record levels
The survey finds that the number of healthcare and social assistance jobs is at an all-time high. According to August 2022 estimates, there are 152,000 open jobs in the health care and social assistance industry. For a cumulative 6.4% increase over June and July, this represents a 0.4% increase. In some hospitals, emergency rooms have been closed or service cuts have been made because of a lack of staff.
Immigrants are primarily responsible for filling open positions in the healthcare sector. A third of Canadian doctors and a quarter of Canadian nurses are not native-born. Although foreign-trained medical professionals can struggle to gain the necessary licensures from Canadian authorities, this means they have a much harder time finding employment in their field and easing the burden on the healthcare sector.
IRCC is currently working on removing obstacles that prevent foreign-trained physicians from moving to Canada and making immigration easier for physicians who have already been granted temporary residency visas.
Employment in professional, scientific, and technical services increases
During the quarter, professional, scientific, and technical service employment increased a little. A total of 5,200 new jobs were added to the payroll in August, an increase of 0.4%. Ontario and British Columbia added the most jobs, while Quebec and Alberta added over 500 each.
Among the industries reporting the largest increases in payroll employment, management, scientific, and technical consulting accounted for 1,200 people. Particularly, the growth rate of the computer system design industry is outperforming that of the entire sector, with gains on 65,900 posts filled since September 2021.
In August, there were 59,600 open positions, which is comparable with the figures from the same time last year.
Despite wage growth, it is not keeping up with the consumer price index
In August 2021, wages were up 3.2%, which is just slightly more than July’s 3.3% growth rate. Growing wages, employment composition, and hours worked can be measured by the pace of growth. All industries showed little variation in total hours spent across assessments made from month to month or year to year.
CPI growth was more than 50% greater than wage growth during that period, according to the consumer price index (CPI). In other words, goods and services are costing more than the national income, which indicates that prices are rising faster than wages.
Wages increased the most in the services industry. Job growth was 11.9% in banking and insurance, while 10.5% in business and enterprise administration.
Good-producing and service-producing sectors both experienced significant pay increases. Logging, construction, and forestry are slow-growing industries along with manufacturing, mining, oil and gas production, and mining.
Since August 2021, the growth of healthcare wages has been sluggish, at 0.9%. 2.4% less money was made in pay for educational services and 1.1% less money was made in wages for informative and cultural services.
