What do the July jobs numbers mean for the Ottawa economy?

Weakening job market Pedro Antunes of the Conference Board of Canada discusses the latest economic data and what it means for the Ottawa and Canadian economy.

Ottawa saw some growth in its overall jobs numbers in July, according to Statistics Canada, but also saw an uptick in the unemployment rate.

Employment rose from 645,500 workers in June to 650,600 in July. The unemployment rate rose from 6.0 in June to 6.3 in July, as approximately 2,400 more people started looking for work.

Labour numbers reported by Statistics Canada paint a bleaker picture for young people and new Canadians. In Ontario, the unemployment rate for people aged 15 to 24 was 16.4 per cent, compared to 6.7 per cent for all workers 15 and older provincewide. The unemployment rate for recent immigrants was 12.6 per cent in July across all of Canada.

What do these latest figures mean for the local economy? Pedro Antunes, Chief Economist at the Conference Board of Canada, joined CTV's Katie Griffin on CTV News at Six to discuss.

The interview below has been lightly edited for clarity.

Katie Griffin: What do these numbers tell you? Do they say that we are inching closer to a recession?

Pedro Antunes: I don't think I'd say recession. I think what we're seeing is essentially the impact of monetary policy taking a firmer hold. There's no doubt that high interest rates have had a big impact on consumers across Canada and we're starting to see the implications of that on the labour market. In fact, we haven’t lost jobs; what we've seen is essentially jobs flattening out for the last three months now. At the same time, we have had really strong immigration, mostly non-permanent residents, that is people coming in as temporary foreign workers or foreign students, and that's kind of allowed the labour force to swell, even though employment's remained stable. So, what we're seeing is the unemployment rate up and labour markets slackening.

Griffin: What is isolating Ottawa for the job gains?

Antunes: Ottawa's had a really stellar performance last year. We saw very, very strong job growth in the Ottawa-Gatineau area and public service obviously drives a lot of that. We have an IT sector as well, retail activity, tourism, all of these sectors have been doing a little bit better in the region, but we are seeing the same kind of impact — essentially strong immigration, international and inter-region, into the city and a slackening labour market here as well. We've actually see the unemployment rate in Ottawa climb in a fairly important way, in line with the national, from about 5 per cent to 6.2 per cent, overall.

Griffin: And the stats showing that it's newcomers and young people who are having a very, very time finding jobs, why is that a weak sign in the economy?

Antunes: The good news is that when we're looking at the overall labour market, it's still holding up fairly well. The biggest impact has been on those young workers, the ages 15 to 24 is where we're seeing the biggest increase in the unemployment rate. And newcomers, of course, are having a much harder time finding work, especially when we're talking about international students who are able to join the workforce and put in hours in the labour force. Why is that hard on the economy? It's one impact. Luckily, we're not seeing across-the-board weakness and we're still holding up on aggregate. It's, again, this dichotomy that we're seeing in the labour market here, with this weakness.