Canada lost 11,000 construction workers in April 2024, even as PM Justin Trudeau was promising to build 4 million new houses in his budget announcements.
According to the latest data from Statistics Canada on employment by worker class, Canada dropped from roughly 1,600,900 construction workers to 1,589,800 in just a month between March and April—a loss of roughly 11,100 construction workers.
This loss of critical construction workers came the same month as Trudeau released his 2024 federal budget, promising to build 4 million new houses in just 7 years—a task which would require the building of a new home every single minute of every single hour of every single day until 2031.
Additionally, yearly data between April 2023 and April 2024 shows that few strides have been made in terms of the private sector (+1.4%) or self-employment (-0.8%), with the majority of all employment gains a result of the bulging public sector, which is up 4.9%.
Thus, while public administration, service jobs, support services, information and culture jobs, technical services, etc., are all up, jobs in sectors like construction, utilities, agriculture, manufacturing, and even real estate are either down or practically flat, seeing either negative or negligible growth.
Job growth overshadowed by mass immigration
Moreover, any actual growth in jobs is vastly overshadowed by Canada’s untenable mass immigration plan, leading to rising unemployment. For instance, in February 2024, Canada gained 41,000 jobs, but the unemployment rate actually rose because immigration continues to outpace all job growth (0.2% job growth vs. 0.3% population growth).
This also speaks to another huge issue facing the country: the increase in low-wage part-time work being given to new immigrants vs. high-wage full-time work once the norm in Canada.
As noted by Statistics Canada, while full-time work between February 2023 and February 2024 rose by 1.6%, part-time work rose by 3% (nearly double the rate) over the same period. And unfortunately, this trend is expected to continue.
