AI Analysis: Employment by industry, monthly, seasonally adjusted and unadjusted, and trend-cycle, last 5 months

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 14100355 provides nearly 50 years of monthly Canadian employment data across 21 NAICS industries, spanning January 1976 to March 2026 with 73,386 records. The data reveals a strongly right-skewed employment distribution — mean of 1,516.6K versus a median of 585.8K persons — driven by a few dominant sectors, while most industries show remarkably high positive correlations (above 0.99) in their long-run growth trends. Seven statistically extreme outlier months were identified, most likely concentrated in the COVID-19 period of 2020, which produced unprecedented labour market disruptions.

Key Findings

• The dataset spans 603 monthly observations from January 1976 to March 2026, covering 21 NAICS industry categories across three data types: Seasonally Adjusted, Trend-Cycle, and Unadjusted.
• Employment values range dramatically from 2.2K to 21,449.7K persons, with a high standard deviation of 3,289.7K confirming vast size differences between industries such as agriculture and total all-industry employment.
• The distribution is heavily right-skewed, with a mean employment of 1,516.6K but a median of only 585.8K, and a middle 50% of values concentrated between just 25.7K and 1,196.5K persons.
• Retail trade and Wholesale & retail trade exhibit the strongest inter-industry correlation at 0.999, while even the weakest pair — Agriculture vs. Professional, scientific & technical services — still shows a strong positive correlation of 0.777, indicating all industries tend to grow together over the long run.
• Professional, scientific & technical services follows the most distinct growth trajectory among all sectors, appearing in 4 of the 5 weakest industry correlation pairs.
• Seven outlier months were detected where month-over-month employment changes exceeded 2.5 standard deviations from the average monthly gain of +19.0K persons (standard deviation of 114.8K), with the COVID-19 period (March–June 2020) identified as the most likely source of extreme disruptions.
• The Services-producing sector correlates at 0.999 with total employment, confirming that service industries are the primary driver of Canada's overall labour market trends.