AI Analysis: Employment, average hourly and weekly earnings (including overtime), and average weekly hours for the industrial aggregate excluding unclassified businesses, monthly, seasonally adjusted

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada Table 14100222 provides 25 years of monthly, seasonally adjusted employment and earnings data across 14 Canadian regions and 11 estimate types, totalling 46,508 observations from January 2001 to February 2026. All major earnings metrics have roughly doubled over this period, with average weekly earnings for all employees rising 103.7% from $656.88 to $1,338.24, reflecting sustained wage growth across Canada's industrial aggregate. The most significant disruption in an otherwise stable long-run trend was the COVID-19 shock of 2020, which drove national employment down to approximately 13.6 million before a partial recovery.

Key Findings

• Average weekly earnings for all Canadian employees more than doubled over 25 years, growing 103.7% from $656.88 in January 2001 to $1,338.24 in February 2026.
• Salaried employees consistently out-earn hourly workers, averaging $34.03/hour and $1,268.81/week compared to $23.59/hour and $727.97/week for hourly paid employees.
• The COVID-19 pandemic (March–August 2020) is the dataset's single most significant anomaly, with national employment plunging to a low of approximately 13.6 million from a high of ~15.9 million — no other periods were flagged as statistical outliers using the IQR 2.5x method.
• Average weekly hours for hourly paid workers remained remarkably stable over the full 25-year period, with a mean of 30.74 hours and a narrow range of just 8.5 hours.
• The dataset comprises 154 unique time series across 14 geographic regions and 11 estimate types, with employment figures spanning from small territorial counts to a national total exceeding 18.3 million persons.
• Earnings variables — including weekly and hourly earnings for both salaried and hourly employees — are strongly positively correlated with one another, reflecting broad, economy-wide wage growth trends rather than sector-specific movements.
• Regional rankings of average hourly earnings over the full 2001–2026 history reveal persistent provincial wage disparities, with some provinces consistently leading and others trailing the national average across the entire dataset.