AI Analysis: Labour force characteristics by industry, monthly, seasonally adjusted, last 5 months

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 14100291 tracks four labour force characteristics across 20 NAICS industries on a monthly seasonally adjusted basis from January 1987 to February 2026, comprising 107,328 records across 312 unique time series. Over nearly 40 years, Canada's employment grew substantially while the national unemployment rate fell from 9.5% to 1.8%, with the most dramatic disruptions concentrated around the COVID-19 period. The dataset reveals a highly right-skewed distribution driven by aggregate economy-wide totals, with only 124 extreme outliers detected across the full historical record using a rigorous 3× IQR method.

Key Findings

• Canada's national unemployment rate declined from 9.5% in January 1987 to 1.8% in February 2026, hitting a historical peak of 12.1% — most likely during the COVID-19 recession — before recovering.
• Total employment across all industries ranged from approximately 3,749K to 14,920K persons over the full period, reflecting decades of long-term workforce growth punctuated by economic downturns.
• The dataset's VALUE column is highly right-skewed, with an overall mean of 464.21 thousand persons but a median of just 13.60, driven by large aggregate industry totals reaching up to 22,697.7 thousand.
• Unemployment (in absolute numbers) fell by nearly 872K persons over the full period, dropping from approximately 1,274K to 403K actively unemployed Canadians as of February 2026.
• The Unemployment Rate varies widely at the industry level, averaging 2.3% with a standard deviation of 3.0% and a maximum of 36.8%, highlighting significant sector-specific labour market volatility.
• Only 124 outlier data points were identified out of 107,328 total records (less than 0.12%) using the 3× IQR method, confirming that extreme labour market disruptions — such as those in 2020 — are statistically rare even across a 40-year horizon.
• A full 78×78 correlation matrix revealed that employment levels and labour force totals tend to move strongly together across industries, reflecting the influence of broad macroeconomic cycles on sector-level labour dynamics.