The Canadian economy churned out a better-than-expected 22,400 new jobs in November, but the unemployment rate ticked up slightly as more people were looking for work, Statistics Canada said today.

Last month’s jobless rate was 6.3%, up a 10th of a percentage point from October.

Economists had been expecting about 15,000 new jobs would be created.

StatsCan said November’s job growth was in part-time work as the number of full-time jobs actually fell.

Alberta continued to be a jobs hot spot, adding 10,000 new jobs. Since the start of the year, the province has added 112,000 jobs – 40% of the country’s total job creation. Alberta’s unemployment continues to be the lowest among all the provinces, at 3.1%.

Nova Scotia enjoyed the biggest drop in unemployment. Its jobless rate fell 0.8 percentage points to 7.4%. That’s a 30-year low.

Ontario added 19,000 new jobs, all of them part-time. But its jobless rate remained at 6.4%. Since the start of the year, weakness in manufacturing has held job creation in the province to 71,000.

As for the manufacturing sector, it saw a rare increase last month, as 13,200 factory jobs were added to the nation’s payrolls. However, in the past year, 72,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared as exporters struggle to deal with the high Canadian dollar.

The healthiest job sector so far this year has been natural resources, where employment has risen by 36,000, or 11.8%. Most of that growth has been concentrated in Alberta and British Columbia, home to the booming oil, natural gas, and mining sectors.