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Job seekers visit booths at a job fair in Shanghai January 10, 2015. Chinese municipal governments must widen unemployment benefits to residents who are not registered locally, China said on Wednesday, as it dismantles hurdles to urbanisation efforts by easing conditions for migrant workers. Picture taken January 10, 2015. REUTERS/Stringer REUTERS/Stringer

Statistics Canada has released a revised labour-force survey noting the job growth in 2014, and it revealed a disturbing scenario. The agency on Wednesday said the number of jobs gained in 2014 was only 121,300, 35 percent lower than the expected 185,700 estimated early in January. Moreover, the December 2014 unemployment rate hit 6.7 percent, versus the initial 6.6 percent estimate.

All in all, the Canadian labour market was in a far deeper rut than imagined. And as prices of oil continue to tumble, Canada’s labour force in 2015 looks to get worse. “You have to be worried for the labour market for 2015,” Krishen Rangasamy, senior economist at National Bank Financial, told Bloomberg, suddenly recalling the Bank of Canada’s surprise rate cuts. “Putting the two reports together, the Bank of Canada (BoC) was probably right in surprising the market and cutting rates.”

Sometime mid-January, the BoC surprised analysts when it slashed its key lending rates to 0.75 percent, citing several labour-market indicators that included long-term unemployment to prove its point the jobs market is slow-moving. The latest data by Statistics Canada not only proves Canada’s job growth was weaker than expected, but could also “pave for another rate cut in March,” the Globe and Mail quoted Jennifer Lee, senior economist at Bank of Montreal.

With the revision, effectively 65,000 jobs supposedly gained in 2014 were lost. “We’re talking about one third of the jobs that we gained in 2014 just vanishing before our eyes. So the outlook for 2015 doesn’t look too great in terms of employment,” CBC quoted CIBC economist Nick Exarhos.

Further adding fuel to the gloomy Canadian unemployment scenario is the labour force participation rate, which indicates the number of working age adults who are either working or looking for work. Based on the revised numbers, the number of adults who had stopped looking for work is now at a whopping 65.7 percent, the lowest since 2000. What’s more, it is just a few notches away from the roughly 67.7 percent recorded at the height of the financial crisis.

Rangasamy said overall job growth was only 2.9 million in the past 14 years. The pre-revision estimate was 3.03 million. The “big chunk” of that was during the recession and in 2014.

Canada’s overall employment rate for 2014 grew 0.7 percent, not far from 2013 but below the 1.8 percent growth in 2012.