February may be the shortest month, but it punched above its weight when it came to job losses. Statistics Canada (StatCan) data shows employment fell in February, concentrated entirely in full-time roles. The little growth over the past year has been public sector expansion, masking a stalling private sector. The result: unemployment is at recession levels, despite policymakers borrowing aggressively to prevent exactly that.
Canada Lost 84k Jobs Last Month, All Full-Time
Employment fell 0.4% (84k jobs) to 21.04 million in February, with 108k full-time jobs lost just last month. This marks the second straight monthly decline (January shed 25k jobs), rolling employment back to September 2025 levels. Full-time roles account for the entire volume of losses, partially offset by part-time roles.
The composition is even more problematic. Private sector employment fell 0.5% in February and hasn’t grown in the past year. All net job gains since last year have come from public hiring. Strip out government employment, and Canada created zero net jobs in a whole year.
We’ve repeated this all too often in recent months, but here it is again: Public sector employment isn’t a problem. It’s a problem that it’s the only form of employment.
Canada’s Got 99 Problems & Unemployment Is… 1.51 Million
The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate climbed 0.2 points to 6.7% in February. Not quite back to December 2025 levels, but it wipes out the abrupt January decline that was most likely a side effect of the volatile seasonal adjustment modelling in the face of non-seasonal disruptions. After the initial pandemic surge subsided, this level was only breached in 2024. It’s currently 1.2 points higher than where we started in 2020, meaning workers have outpaced jobs 28.8% since then.
The number of unemployed workers is even more concerning than the rate suggests. The unemployed population grew 3.9% (+56.7k workers) to 1.51 million in February, 2.0% (+30.4k) higher than last year. This is a volume previously not seen outside of serious recessions. It’s now the level in a supposedly healthy economy.
The surge is even more concerning once you realize it excludes a large number of job seekers. Discouraged from actively seeking work due to extended unemployment? Not unemployed. Full-time student attending classes during the survey’s reference work week? Also not statistically unemployed. The data doesn’t look great, even when highly optimized to minimize the problems.
The job losses weren’t simple attrition. If roles were eliminated only through retirement, unemployment would hold steady or even improve, as the labour force shrinks. Instead, unemployment grew while the population slowed. That’s the opposite dynamic of a healthy labour market. When slower population growth doesn’t help employment, the economy is in a contraction pattern. Even if the economy isn’t technically in recession, this is what recession-level unemployment looks like.
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