Canada's labour market, five ways

A first-draft write-up — the chart and data are real; the words are a starting point to make your own.

Most "labour market" stories pick one number — the national unemployment rate — and run with it. But that single number hides five different stories, depending on how you cut it. This is all five in one place: change the view above and the same chart re-draws with a new breakdown.

Start with 2020

Whatever view you're on, press play and watch for the spring of 2020. The pandemic shows up as the most violent movement in any of these fifty-year series — unemployment rates vaulting upward, whole industries shedding jobs in a single month. It's a useful reminder that the smooth trends we tell stories about can break in weeks.

What each view is good for

• By province — the spread between provinces is the story. Watch Alberta swing with oil prices and the Atlantic provinces sit persistently higher. Toggle Canada off to compare the provinces directly.
• By age — youth unemployment (15–24) runs far above prime-age and moves far more violently in every downturn. The gap is the point.
• By industry — this one's in job counts, not rates. Health care and retail have become the country's largest employers; watch manufacturing's long, slow decline underneath them.
• By education — the "does a degree protect you" view. The lines almost never cross: more education, lower unemployment, in good times and bad.
• By occupation — where the jobs actually are, by type of work rather than industry.

The national unemployment rate is an average of experiences that look nothing alike. These five views are five ways of refusing that average.

A note on the data

Province, age, and industry are monthly and seasonally adjusted, going back to 1976. Education and occupation are only published annually, so those two views animate year-by-year and start later (1990 and 1987). Rates are in percent; industry and occupation are in number of jobs. Everything is pulled from Statistics Canada's open API and baked into a single static file, so it loads instantly and always matches the commentary here.