Quote, unquote: Employment measures

"If I were limited to a single metric to use for the health of the labour market, I would use this one. But limiting ourselves to one measure is ill-advised. There are a number of factors we could still control for, such as the ratio of new Canadians to those born here. We have said nothing about wages and the labour market struggles of new graduates and women are important and not captured here. But to properly analyze the health of the labour market, we need to control for demographic, population size, nature of work and social changes. Simply citing the unemployment rate or the number of people with a job is not enough. But by controlling for these factors, we see that the Canadian labour market is not particularly strong."

I have never understood the employment data as well as I do now, having read Mike Moffatt's blog post on Canadian Business.