Canada’s unemployment rate fell two-tenths of a percentage point to 6.4% in February, Statistics Canada said today.

The Canadian economiy churned out 24,700 new jobs last month, matching analysts’ expectations.

The job creation was due entirely to growth in part-time work. More than 56,000 part-time jobs were added, while more than 31,000 full-time positions disappeared.

The StatsCan figures show that Alberta’s boom continues. The province registered its second highest monthly employment gain on record, adding 25,100 new jobs. That was enough to drive Alberta’s jobless rate down to 3.1% – a record low for the province.

Fully half of the 275,000 new jobs created across Canada in the last year have been in Alberta and British Columbia. The resource boom is also helping Newfoundland and Labrador, where employment increased by 6,000 last month and the jobless rate dropped by 1.4 percentage points to 15.1%.

In Ontario, where 82,000 manufacturing jobs have vanished since the end of 2002, factory employment actually rose last month. The unemployment rate in Ontario fell to 6.2% as the number of young people looking for work dropped.

The government agency reported that the average hourly wage in Canada was 3.3% higher than it was a year earlier. In red-hot Alberta, hourly wages soared by 6.1%.

Separately, StatsCan sadid labour productivity in the Canadian business sector rose for the first time in three years in 2005, and the nation’s manufacturing sector played a considerable role in the recovery.