27% of Canada's Jobless Are Long-Term Unemployed: Why That Number Stings
Nearly 27% of Canada's unemployed have been jobless long-term, per September Labour Force Survey data — a signal the market's problem is slow hiring, not layoffs.
Updated
Twenty-seven percent of unemployed Canadians were out of work long-term in September's jobs data — and as BNN Bloomberg's panelist put it, "that is a big number." The figure comes from Statistics Canada's September Labour Force Survey, the country's main monthly employment report, and it lands at a moment when hiring has been sluggish across most of the country.
What does 27% long-term unemployment actually mean?
Long-term unemployment usually counts people who've been jobless for roughly six months or more. So nearly three in ten Canadians who are unemployed right now have been searching for an extended stretch — not just between contracts or on a short layoff.
Put it in household terms: if you lined up 100 unemployed workers, about 27 of them have been at it for half a year or longer. The longer someone stays out of work, the harder re-entry gets — skills atrophy, networks go cold, and employers screen for gaps. That's why economists treat the long-term share as a quality-of-the-market indicator, separate from the headline unemployment rate.
The takeaway: the headline rate tells you how many people are jobless; the 27% tells you how stuck many of them are.
National trend versus the individual picture
At the national level, the story is one of weak hiring rather than mass layoffs. Canada's labor market has cooled through 2024 as high interest rates slowed the economy, and job creation hasn't kept pace with population growth. When openings are scarce, job searches stretch out — and the long-term unemployment share climbs even without a spike in layoffs.
For an individual job seeker, that mechanism matters more than the topline. If you're currently unemployed, you're competing in a market where more than a quarter of your fellow searchers have been looking for months. That doesn't mean giving up — it means your search needs to account for a slower matching process: longer timelines, more applicants per posting, and employers who can afford to be picky.
The takeaway: this is a slow-hiring market, not a firing market, and that changes what a realistic job search looks like.
What was said on the data
Speaking on BNN Bloomberg about the September figures, Anderson flagged the long-term unemployment share directly: 27%, "that is a big number." The comment reflects a growing concern among Canadian labor-market watchers — that even as headline unemployment stabilizes, the composition of joblessness is worsening.
The one-line closer: watch whether that 27% shrinks in the October report, because a falling long-term share would be the first real signal that Canada's labor market is healing rather than just holding.
Source: Google News: Jobs report
More from Grace Kim
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Correspondent covering money, funding and market shifts around Job market data and labor economics at Path & Pay.
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