Statistics Canada released benchmark revisions to 2014 data and revealed that unemployment is at 6.7%, not 6.6% previously reported.
For the full year, the economy added 121K jobs, not the 185.7K originally reported. That’s a 30% revision.
In addition, the trend looks to be weakening. In December, the economy lost 11.3K jobs; worse than the -4.3K originally reported. Full time jobs growth in the month was also downgraded to +35K from +53.5K.
The revisions, going back to 2001, were based in part on new census data from the 2011 national survey. Previous numbers were calculated using the 2006 census data and undergo an annual revision to account for new weightings of seasonal factors.
There hasn’t been much good news for the loonie in a long time and this report won’t help it immediately gave a lift to USD/CAD to 1.2452 from 1.2436. I think that might be understating how bad this report is.
For instance, the unemployment rate would have risen all the way to 6.9% if the labor force participation rate wasn’t cut to 65.7% from 65.9%
