AI Analysis: Labour force characteristics by economic region, three-month moving average, unadjusted for seasonality

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 14100462 provides 15 years of monthly Canadian labour force data (March 2011–March 2026) across 10 key characteristics and 28 unique time series, revealing steady long-term growth in employment and population punctuated by sharp disruptions during the COVID-19 period. The dataset's three-month moving averages expose structural trends including a mean unemployment rate of 6.8% (peaking at 13.4% during COVID-19) and a tightly stable participation rate ranging narrowly between 61.7% and 68.1%. Correlation analysis confirms expected relationships — Population, Labour Force, and Employment move in strong positive alignment, while Unemployment Rate and Employment Rate trend in opposite directions — making this a robust resource for labour market analysis.

Key Findings

• The dataset spans 181 monthly periods from March 2011 to March 2026, containing 5,068 rows across 10 labour force characteristics and 28 unique time series vectors, last updated April 10, 2026.
• Population is the largest and most stable characteristic, averaging 30,584 thousand persons (ranging from ~27,782 to ~34,737 thousand), with mean and median closely aligned — the only characteristic showing a near-normal distribution.
• The unemployment rate averaged 6.8% over the 15-year period but reached a high of 13.4%, almost certainly reflecting the unprecedented labour market disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2021.
• Participation rate was the most tightly distributed rate-based metric, ranging only from 61.7% to 68.1% with a standard deviation of approximately 0.9%, indicating long-run structural stability in labour force attachment.
• 17 statistically significant outliers (|Z-score| > 2.5) were detected across multiple labour force characteristics, with the COVID-19 era identified as the likely source of the highest concentration of anomalies.
• Employment averaged ~18,760 thousand persons and Labour Force ~7,571 thousand (mean), with both tracking closely together over time, while Part-time Employment was the smallest count-based category at an average of ~3,510 thousand persons.
• Three statistics types — Estimate, Standard Error of Estimate, and Standard Error of Year-over-Year Change — are included for each indicator, enabling rigorous uncertainty quantification alongside trend analysis.