The data supporting these comments are drawn from Statistics Canada which publishes monthly details for employees in Canada. The data included total hours and hours for each industry where the industry is defined according to the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS).

The Canadian economy supported employment of almost 27 billion hours in 2001, increasing to just over 30 billion hours in 2008. The Global Financial Crisis struck in 2009 threatening to destroy the financial architecture supporting the global trade system. Governments responded with very strong interventions in the market economy with mixed results, but that is a story for a another commentary.

The economy recovered to its pre-crisis level in 2011 and growing slowly in 2012, peaking at almost 33 billion hours in 2019. See Tab FIG 1 of the spreadsheet included with this commentary. The global economy was shut down in 2020 as a response to the covid-19 pandemic and total employment hours dropped 12 per cent that year with historic drops in public-facing service providing industries such as retail services (minus 10%), accommodation and food services (minus 36%) and real-estate (minus 18%). Greater detail is provided in the associated spreadsheet). Some highlight observations:

1. Tab FIG 1A shows that selected industries most notably mining had declining employment hours the year before the global shut down.
2. Tab FIG 1B shows the full and almost immediate effect of the shut down. (Note the 2019 increase is shown in the figure for comparison.)
3. Tab FIG 1C shows that selected industries exhibited signs of recovery but were still well below their pre-covid levels of employment.
4. Tab FIG 1D illustrates that certain industries had exhibited a strong recovery by 2022 well exceeding their pre-covid levels of employment (professional services, construction, and health and social services) but some industries such as accommodation and food industries still down almost 15 % from their 2019 levels are still struggling.

The spreadsheet associated with this commentary provides assistance to the reader to dig deeper into the data.