The employment report is due at 1330 GMT Friday 9 February 2018. I posted two previews here:

This now via RBC:

  • We see a modest 5K increase in employment in January after back-to-back monthly gains of almost 80K to close out 2017 for the LFS. Those gains look outsized relative to the ~2% annualized GDP growth rate that we are tracking for Q4, which is behind our below-trend increase this time around.
  • The unemployment rate fell a full 0.5pp over the last two months and we see it ticking back up 0.1pp to 5.8% in January.
  • Wage growth has picked up but remains a bit low relative to the unemployment rate at 2.9% y/y for permanent workers. In any case, the BoC's recently introduced wage-common measure discounted the LFS wage growth figure in favour of less timely values from productivity, national accounts, and establishment employment data.

And ... they go on ... check this out:

After back-to-back gains totalling about 145,000 new jobs for each of the past two months, it may be a stretch to expect another positive, let alone a big one.

Since the inception of the Labour Force Survey in 1976, there have been two other times when two consecutive months have matched or exceeded the pace of job gains registered in the two months of November and December of last year.

  • Evidence drawn from those two periods about what may happen the following month is a draw. After March-April 2012 when 187k jobs were created, May dipped but only by 21k.
  • The other time was in Jan-Feb 1976 when 200,800 jobs were created and then each of March and April followed up with additional and sizeable gains.

The point is that another strong number would be a low probability event, but not an impossible one while bearing in mind that consensus has a longstanding tendency to lowball Canadian job growth.

  • Seriously lowball. I mean astoundingly so. Out of the 601,000 jobs created since job growth began to go vertical after July 2016, the median consensus calls have cumulatively forecast only 81,000 for a cumulative forecast miss of over half a million jobs.

This is why I have a problem with the argument one sometimes hears to ignore the jobs reports. One or two, maybe. But ignoring or talking down the trend instead of altering one's thinking may be precisely the problem when it comes to the relatively growth bearish and rates bullish bias one hears across parts of the street including the alarmist concerns about housing and the consumer.

He (or she) could be taking about Australia too ... ?