Source: The Canadian Press

Canada’s dormant labour market sprang back to life in January, generating a surprisingly strong 69,200 new jobs — most of them going to women in the public and services sectors.

The agency said 55,400 of the new jobs went to adult women, 10,000 to adult men and 3,800 to youth.

The employment jump reported Friday by Statistics Canada was about four times greater than economists had expected and the largest since last April 2010. But there was some skepticism about the survey’s accuracy.

That’s partly because last week Statistics Canada revised the previous round of numbers, shaving 67,000 jobs from its previous tally. The revision was attributed to a recalculation to reflect population growth measured by the previous census.

Still, job growth has been accelerating in Canada in each of the past four months.

Bank of Montreal economist Douglas Porter said for the most part he believes that the jobs trend is turning positive again after about six months of stalled or moderate growth.

“It’s surprising, but it’s not a complete shock,” Porter said.

“We’ve had indications the U.S. economy was starting to improve and perhaps employers were a bit more confident about adding to their payrolls.”

Despite the spurt in jobs, the national unemployment rate climbed two-tenths of a point to 7.8%, a result of more Canadians returning to the market to hunt for a new job.

Not all of the jobs data in Canada pointed to strength, however.

There were slightly more part-time than full-time jobs created, which meant there was not a notable increase in overall hours worked.

CIBC economist Benjamin Tal said the quality of new jobs is trending downward in terms of part-time over full-time, higher ratios of self-employed workers and many in services, which are generally lower paying.

“This is not only good news because the quality of jobs is trending downwards,” he said.

January’s gain does bring the economy to the point where many thought it stood before last week’s revision by Statistics Canada — once more, Canada can claim to have recouped all of the jobs that were lost during the recession, the only G7 member able to do so.

The agency now says there are 327,000 more Canadians working since last January, and 467,000 more since the downturn ended in July 2009.

By contrast the worst in the group of advanced nations, the U.S., is still about seven million shy of the pre-recession peak.

Conservative House Leader John Baird was quick to give credit to his party’s handling of the economy.

“That’s fantastic news for the Canadian economy — you know we’ve recovered all the jobs we lost since we bottomed out in the recession,” said Conservative House Leader John Baird.

“It just shows that the economic plan of this government is working, this low tax plan is working and we’ve got to stay the course and not change course.”

One encouraging aspect of the report is that employment growth was spread widely across Canada.

Eight provinces joined the list of winners, leaving only British Columbia and New Brunswick on the negative column. And there were some big gains in Ontario Alberta where employment grew by 36,300 and 21,600 jobs respectively. Relative to their population size, Nova Scotia with a 6,200-job rise and Newfoundland with a gain of 4,900 were also significant winners.

The agency said January saw good pickups in business, building and other support services, public administration and agriculture, whereas transportation and warehousing shed 32,000 workers and accommodation and food services lost 26,000.