Halifax Adds Thousands Of Jobs In September
HALIFAX — Unemployment in Halifax fell for the fourth month in a row in September as nearly 3,500 people found work in the city.
According to Statistics Canada, 236,900 people were working in Halifax last month, up from 233,500 in August.
A large chunk of those new jobs were created in the Health Care and Social Assistance, and Accommodation and Food Services industries. While most industries in Nova Scotia added jobs last month, the group of extractive industries including Fishing, Mining, Forestry, Oil, and Gas continued to shed workers.
While work was overall easier to come by in Halifax last month, 21,600 Haligonians who wanted a job still couldn’t find one. That put the city’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate at 8.4 percent in September.
It’s still a notable improvement from August when 10.1 percent of people couldn’t find work in Halifax. It’s also lower than the nationwide unemployment rate, which last month sat at 9 percent.
Unemployment in Halifax has been creeping down since June when Covid-19-fueled jobs losses peaked and the city’s jobless rate rocketed to 11.9 percent.
In February, before the pandemic hit Halifax, 6.6 percent of the city’s working population was out of a job.
StatsCan says young people have been hit the hardest by Covid-19 job losses, as nearly 23 percent of people aged 15-24 remain jobless in Nova Scotia.
Across the country, unemployment was also down. StatsCan says there were 1.8 million people without work in Canada last month, which was down more than 200,000 from August.
The country’s 9 percent unemployment rate was a 1.2 percentage point drop from the previous month and continued a four-month downward trend from the record-high 2.6 million unemployed people in May.