If you need any further evidence that Canada’s housing boom continues, data from StatsCan released this week could be the clincher.
The statistics agency’s survey of payroll employment, earnings and hours showed that industries related to housing — namely construction and real estate — were two of the three fastest-growing sectors in Canada when it comes to jobs.
The number of real estate-related jobs in Canada jumped 3.9 per cent in the year to May, 2013 — nearly five times as fast as the rate of job creation as a whole in the country. Construction jobs grew nearly as quickly, jumping 3.1 per cent.
Job numbers for the food and accommodation sector (read: burger-flipping and bed-making) also jumped, by 3.6 per cent. But this might only be good news if you’re a foreigner looking to work in Canada. According to government documents obtained by the Toronto Star, the feds issue more foreign worker permits for cooks than for any other occupation.
Some sectors saw pretty steep declines in employment. Now might be the wrong time to look for work in management, where jobs fell by 3.7 per cent. And now is almost certainly not the right time to look for work in forestry, where more than one in 20 jobs (5.2 per cent) disappeared over the last year.
Overall, the number of jobs in Canada increased by 0.8 per cent in the year to May. With Canada’s population growing at about one per cent per year, that’s slightly less than the number of jobs needed to keep up with population growth — a chronic problem in Canada’s economy in recent years.
Here are the industries with the best and worst job creation records over the past year.
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