Recently, Tanya Fir, Alberta’s minister of jobs, economy, and innovation, published an update on the Alberta economy.
I don’t want to get into the entire article, but there is a section on jobs I’d like to provide some context to.
Our employment over the past three months was up 4,600 from the second quarter, compared with Canada’s decrease of 49,200. Year to date, Alberta leads the country in job growth, a fact we can all be proud of.
This statement was parroted by Pat Rehn, the UCP MLA for Lesser Slave Lake, in a recent tweet.
Alberta’s newest premier, Danielle Smith, tweeted something similar.
Kaycee Madu, alberta’s labour minister, also tweeted out the same image as Rehn:
The UCP caucus Twitter account tweeted out the same image that Rehn did:
The UCP caucus’s tweet was retweeted by Matt Jones, the minister of Children’s Services and the UCP MLA for Calgary-South East.
Fir also sent out this tweet the next day.
Check out Alberta’s job growth numbers for the third quarter though.
| Jul 2022 | Aug 2022 | Sep 2022 | Net change | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full-time | 15,000 | -19,600 | -13,100 | -17,700 |
| Part-time | -14,700 | 13,100 | 24,000 | 22,400 |
| Total | 300 | -6,500 | 10,900 | 4,700 |
While it’s true that Alberta gained 4,700 total jobs over the last 3 months, it was all part-time jobs. In fact, we gained over 22,000 part-time jobs, but because we lost nearly 18,000 full-time jobs, it offset the total job numbers.
Losing nearly 18,000 full-time jobs certainly isn’t something to get excited about.
We gained 15,000 full-time jobs in July, but that was easily all lost the following month, when we lost nearly 20,000. And then to drive the stake in harder, we lost another 13,000 or so last month.
Meanwhile, we gained over 13,000 part-time jobs in August and 24,000 part-time jobs in September.
Not only that, but full-time jobs make up a smaller percentage of total jobs now than they did before the UCP implemented their Job Creation Tax Cut over 3 years ago.
In June 2019, the month before the tax cut, full-time jobs made up 82.5% of all jobs in the province. Last month, they were at 80.8%. The month before, they were at 81.7%, and the month before that, full-time jobs were at 82.3% of total jobs.
Not only that, but if we compare that number to where the other provinces sat last month, Alberta ends up with the third lowest percentage of total jobs being full-time.
| NB | 86.57% |
| NL | 84.34% |
| ON | 82.63% |
| NS | 82.47% |
| PEI | 82.05% |
| SK | 81.28% |
| QC | 81.24% |
| AB | 80.80% |
| MB | 80.78% |
| BC | 78.96% |
It seems weird to me that for a province supposedly leading the country in economic growth, we have fewer full-time jobs—proportionally—than we did 3 years ago.
Not to mention that 7 other provinces are doing a better job than we are at making sure their workers have full-time jobs.
