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Here you can see other videos from our team. Restaurants and hotels started making plans for the summer after COVID 19 restrictions were eased, and restaurants and hotels found it hard to lure staff back. Vacancies in the food and accommodation industry increased 37 per cent to 158,1000 positions at the beginning of March. The vacancy rate, which measures the percentage of total positions that are unfilled, was 12.8 per cent in the hotel and restaurant sector, the highest among the 20 industry groups that Statistics Canada monitors. The vacancy rate was 5.9 per cent, matching the previous peak in September. There were 988,000 vacancies that month, which was the previous record. In February, vacancies had dropped to around 826,000, suggesting that labour markets were loosening. There is a window on the extent to which supply and demand are being rebalanced becauseVacancy data will be a big factor in how aggressively the Bank of Canada raises interest rates to cool inflation. A soft landing was possible because of the Bank of Canada's governor Tiff Macklem, who said last month that they thought a soft landing was possible because employers might adjust their rates to higher interest rates by cutting unfilled positions rather than reducing actual payrolls. If vacancies do start to fall, policymakers could be persuaded to take a gentler path to a higher interest rate setting. If vacancy rates stay high, central bankers may accelerate their interest-rate increases, because the mismatch between supply and demand will put upward pressure on wages, which would in turn fuel inflation.
The labour market will be the best source for data on where the economy and interest rates are headed, according to Stephen Poloz, the previous central bank governor. He said that there was excess demand in the labour market until the job vacancies come to a more normal level until the job vacancies come down to a more normal level. There is a chance that homegrown inflation will emerge. In March, the average weekly earnings increased by 4.3 per cent to $1,169. A year ago, 69 was higher than the year-over-year increase of 2.1 per cent in February. Excluding the pandemic, which skewed the data, it was the biggest increase since January 2011 with the exception of the Pandemic. But pay increases of that size might not be enough to satisfy workers. In March, the consumer price index increased by 6.7 per cent and 6.8 per cent in April, suggesting that the cost of living is rising faster than wages. That means that workers could demand higher pay, and with talent scarce, the odds would be good that they could find someone willing to pay them what they want. Inflationary pressures were reinforced by the fact that employers would have to raise their prices to compensate for higher wage costs.
Statisticians are directly linked to the source because Statistics Canada collects vacancy data from employers payrolls. That means it is probably more reliable than the agency's Labour Force Survey LFS, which relies on household interviews and is published with a large margin of error. The LFS is more timely because it is released with a lag of only a month. The April LFS showed that the jobless rate dropped to a record 5.2 per cent. It is important to note that the vacancy data doesn't have a long history, as the dataset dates to October 2020, and the figures aren't seasonally adjusted. Statistics Canada recognizes that the latter is a shortcoming and said in its latest report that it is working on smoothing the data to reflect natural fluctuations that come with seasonal employment. The agency said experimental vacancy data that accounts for seasonality shows that vacancies increased from September to December 2021, then decreased in January and February before increasing again in March.