AI Analysis: Labour force characteristics by territory, three-month moving average, seasonally adjusted and unadjusted

Executive Summary

This Statistics Canada dataset (Table 14100292) provides 34 years of monthly labour force data across Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut, spanning March 1992 to March 2026 across 630 unique time series and 10 labour force characteristics. The data reveals a long-term tightening of territorial labour markets, with Yukon's unemployment rate falling from 9.0% in 1992 to 2.5% in 2026, punctuated by a dramatic COVID-19 spike to 20.1% in August 2020. Population, Labour Force, and Employment measures are strongly positively correlated, while the unemployment rate shows a clear negative relationship with employment and participation rates.

Key Findings

• The dataset contains 201,702 rows across 630 unique time series, covering 409 monthly periods from March 1992 to March 2026 for three Canadian territories — Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut.
• The overall value distribution is heavily right-skewed, with a mean of 12.64 versus a median of just 2.10, driven by large population-count variables pulling the average upward.
• Yukon's unemployment rate declined significantly from 9.0% in March 1992 to 2.5% in March 2026, reflecting a long-term structural tightening of the northern labour market.
• The most extreme outlier in the dataset is Yukon's unemployment rate spike to 20.1% in August 2020, a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the sharpest single deviation from historical norms in the entire 34-year record.
• The lowest unemployment rate on record was just 0.4% in July 2024, representing an extraordinary period of labour market tightness at the opposite extreme from the 2020 pandemic shock.
• Participation rate and employment rate show the widest value ranges in the dataset (near 0 to over 90), while unemployment values are tightly clustered at the low end with a median of just 0.2 and a maximum of 3.0 thousand persons.
• Population, Labour Force, and Employment are strongly positively correlated with one another, while the Unemployment Rate is negatively correlated with the Employment Rate, consistent with fundamental labour market dynamics.