The COVID-19 pandemic triggered BC’s worst recession since 1982, and just weeks after the province entered a state of emergency in March 2020, we went from seeing record high labour shortages to record high employment losses. Over the past year, however, our labour market has experienced a strong recovery, boosted by easing public health restrictions, rising domestic and global demand for goods and services, and historic levels of government fiscal support through measures such as the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, which covered a significant portion of eligible worker salaries.

Overall, we’re much better off than we were in August 2020. Back then, BC’s unemployment rate stood at 10.7%, more than double the rate of August 2019, and 170,000 fewer people were employed, signifying an employment decline of nearly 7%. Moreover, the average hours worked were down 12% from the previous summer.

By August 2021, however, we’d made significant strides, with employment reaching 2.67 million, signifying a net gain of more than 200,000 jobs over the previous year.

This is hardly surprising, given that industries with high numbers of part-time employees—such as hospitality—were the ones hardest hit by business restrictions and closures in the early days of the pandemic. In fact, nearly a third of BC’s part-time positions were eliminated between March and June 2020 (see Figure 1), so a rebound was to be expected.

We’ve also seen a tremendous recovery in part-time positions because of a larger shift away from full-time work in a variety of sectors, which is reflected in the number of full-time positions and the total number of hours worked. Despite consistent growth over the past year, BC had fewer full-time positions and nearly one million fewer work hours in August 2021 (81.8 million) than in August 2019. So while overall employment is up, the average position offers fewer hours of work.

The unevenness of BC’s employment recovery is also clear from the significant gap between population growth and employment growth over the past two years.

Despite a slowdown in immigration in 2020, the province’s working-age population grew by 105,000 between August 2019 and August 2021 (see Table 1). This growth far exceeded the net gain of 5,000 jobs over the same period, which helps explain why a large number of British Columbians remained out of the workforce despite employment gains. In fact, this significant gap is the primary reason why our unemployment rate remained relatively high.

Of course, it’s important to put BC’s employment rate in context. Prior to the recession in 2020, the province’s labour market had been tightening for many years, leading to record lows in unemployment in 2018 and 2019 (see Figure 2). In fact, throughout 2019, BC’s average monthly unemployment rate stood at 4.7%, down from an average of 7.6% in 2010. So although BC’s unemployment rate of 6.2% in August 2021 was higher than the 5.0% recorded in August 2019, it was actually a marked improvement over the previous year, when unemployment stood at 10.7%.

What kept us from dropping to the record low unemployment rates of 2019 was a 24.3% increase in the number of BC residents (more than 34,000) who were actively seeking employment but unable to find it.