Canada Has Biggest Job Increase in at Least 30 Years

By Alexandre Deslongchamps



Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Canada recorded its biggest one-month employment
gain in at least 30 years as voters get ready for the Oct. 14 election,
adding more than 10 times as many jobs as expected in September.



Employers added 106,900 workers, Statistics Canada said today in Ottawa,
following an August gain of 15,200 jobs. The unemployment rate remained
at 6.1 percent as people entered the labor force. Economists forecast
10,000 new jobs and a jobless rate of 6.2 percent, according to the
median of 20 estimates in Bloomberg surveys.



The report may help Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper,
who has dropped to a virtual dead heat with Liberal opposition leader
Stephane Dion in some polls after leading for most of a campaign.
Harper's effort to depict his party as the best steward of the economy
initially gave him double-digit leads in polls, before the financial
crisis worsened and hurt his popularity.



``This was still much, much better than we would have thought given
what's been happening to the North American economy, and will have
interesting election implications as well,'' Avery Shenfeld, senior
economist at CIBC World Markets Inc. in Toronto, said today in a note to
clients.



A net 40,000 jobs were added in the health-care and social- assistance
industry in September, reversing drops in the previous three months.
Some 19,800 jobs were created in business services, such as maintenance,
and 16,300 positions in transportation and warehousing.



Manufacturers added 19,700 workers, or one percent of their workforce,
erasing their loss for the year. Payrolls are down by 42,600 from a year
earlier.



Part-Time Jobs



Canada added a net 96,600 part-time jobs and 10,300 full- time jobs, the
statistics agency said. The agency says it started using the current
methodology in 1976, making it impossible to compare September's gain to
earlier records.



Support for Harper's party fell to 33 percent on Oct. 8, the lowest
since the start of the campaign, according to Nanos Research, an
Ottawa-based pollster. The Liberals are within 4 percentage points at 29
percent, after trailing by 15 points last month. The margin of error is
2.8 percentage points.



Average hourly wages rose 4.6 percent in September from a year earlier,
trailing an 11-year high of 4.9 percent reached in February. Pay raises
are still outpacing inflation, with the consumer price index advancing
3.5 percent in August from a year earlier, the agency said.



Employers have added 276,800 workers since September 2007, a 1.6 percent
increase, Statistics Canada said.



The Bank of Canada said the economy will grow 1 percent this year, the
slowest since 1992, hobbled by an export slump. The central bank, which
unexpectedly cut its benchmark lending rate by half a percentage point
to 2.5 percent on Oct. 8, has a scheduled rate decision on Oct. 21 and
will revise its economic outlook on Oct. 23.