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January sees 129,000 Canadians lose their jobs

Over 4,000 Canadians a day lost their jobs in January, according to Statistics Canada. A quarter of those losses were in British Columbia.

In its Labour Force Survey January 2009, StatsCan noted that the job losses were mostly in manufacturing, with health care and social assistance jobs increasing by 31,000.

Just three provinces lost workers: Ontario with 71,000, B.C. with 35,000, and Quebec with 26,000. According to StatsCan:

Employment in British Columbia fell in January by 35,000, with gains in part time more than offset by losses in full time. The province’s unemployment rate jumped to 6.1%, an increase of 0.8 percentage points. Following a five-year period of sustained growth, construction employment fell for the fourth consecutive month in January, bringing total losses in that industry to 32,000 since its peak in September 2008.

Meanwhile, the United States lost 598,000 jobs in January and the government revised its December job-loss estimate from 524,000 up to 577,000.

Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee.

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