The mystery of how Statistics Canada calculates farm jobs created or lost continued this month as the federal agency reported that in February, agriculture was the most robust job-creating sector in a Canadian economy going down the drain.
It said the sector recorded an employment increase of close to 17 percent, almost 17,000 new jobs in February, while the overall economy shed an unexpected 83,000 jobs.
February is not a month normally associated with farm hiring.
“It seems like a large shift in my mind, not easy to explain on the surface,” said Ron Bonnett, Canadian Federation of Agriculture vice-president and a board member of the Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council.
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The previous month, the federal statistical agency surprised the industry by reporting a loss of 8,400 jobs, making a year-over-year total of 32,600 agricultural jobs lost, the largest proportionate sectoral job loss in an economy of disappearing jobs.
The January losses caught Agriculture Canada and the CAHRC by surprise.
The council will publish a report in May that shows agriculture in a worker-deficit position that is expected to grow worse over the next few years.
Ritz said he had concerns about how Statistics Canada counts agricultural jobs.
“We can’t in my department seem to make the numbers add up the same as Statistics Canada did.”
The February farm sector job growth numbers also caught Agriculture Canada officials by surprise.
“We just don’t know where those figures come from, maybe an extrapolation from a very small sample,” said one official. “That kind of worker volatility is difficult to explain.”
Bonnett said one explanation could be that the January year-over-year job loss could reflect the loss of workers and farmers in the livestock industry during 2008 as the sector contracted.
The February increase in farm workers could reflect the greenhouse sector efforts to gear up for the 2009 season.
“Those are possible explanations but the numbers do seem hard to square,” he said. “It seems like a large variation.”
The CAHRC May publication will report that a survey of farm employers revealed nine percent of farm jobs now cannot be filled and by next year, there will be a shortage of close to 25,000 farm workers, rising to 52,000 by 2013. Industry and Agriculture Canada projections are in sharp contrast to industry calculations of labour shortages in the future.
“You do have to wonder if it is how they do their calculations,” said Bonnett.
