The Sky Is Not Falling! Looking at the latest unemployment report.

On Friday, October 8 StatsCan released the monthly Labour Force Survey and almost immediately the media went up in arms, crying about the massive loss of jobs and unemployment rate. Instead of going through a similar reaction, we at CMS read the report and think it's important to point to some issues the media didn't;

While it is true that some 44,000 part-time jobs were lost in September, for the most part the media neglected to point out that it is September and a large amount of part-time workers go back to school in September. Further, the travel & tourism and hospitality industries are at their peak in the summer months, so entering into autumn isn't it natural that there will be a decline in part-time work?

And what of full time employment? There was an increase of 37,000 full time jobs! This amount nearly offsets the decline in part-time employment and that's without measuring total hours worked by Canadians! Moreover, there was a gain of some 8,000 full time manufacturing jobs and manufacturing has long been looked to as an indicator of future employment reports.

While the report said that employment dropped for the 15-24 year old age group (remember, it is September!) it also mentioned that the employment rate of those over 55 continues to climb month after month (September being no exception!) Average hourly wages for employees has also climbed 2.3% since last September.

In a nutshell if the headlines have you worried that the sky is falling you should really read this report before looking for an umbrella. Since September 2009 overall employment has risen by 349,000 or 2.1%. International experts are looking to Canada's hiring to outpace the rest of the globe and even domestically we maintain optimism about our pending hiring needs.

There's a lot of good news in the Labour Force Survey - but it might be news to you.