Inuit unemployment still high, despite record job growth

IQALUIT — Nunavut’s government-driven economy has been creating new jobs over the past five years at a faster rate than in any other province or territory of Canada — but not fast enough to make much of a dent in Nunavut’s sky-high Inuit unemployment rate.

“We’re creating jobs at a rate that far outstrips any other province or territory,” said Jack Hicks, the Nunavut government’s territorial statistician, as he unveiled the results of Nunavut’s first labour force survey to reporters earlier this month.

The survey shows that despite an impressive rate of new job creation over the past five years, the unemployment rate among Inuit in Nunavut during the winter of 1999 stood at 28 per cent, virtually unchanged from 1994, when Inuit unemployment stood at 28.2 per cent.

That’s in sharp contrast to the non-Inuit unemployment rate of 2.7 per cent. In 1994, the unemployment rate among non-Inuit in Nunavut stood at 5.0 per cent.

This means that only 86 non-Inuit persons were unemployed during the winter of 1999 in Nunavut, compared to 2,171 Inuit who were unemployed.

Different methods

Overall, Nunavut’s unemployment rate stood at 20.7 per cent in the winter of 1999, well above the national rate of 8.5 per cent.

If all Nunavut job-seekers who have given up looking for work because they know there are no jobs in their communities are counted, Nunavut’s unemployment rate jumps to 27.2 per cent.

A third method that the Nunavut Bureau of Statistics uses to calculate unemployment is to simply count all the people who want jobs but can’t find them.

Using this method, Nunavut’s real unemployment rate could stand at 35.6 per cent — a number that Hicks says may be a little high.

Hicks told reporters, however, that it’s not his job to interpret the meaning of data gathered by this office, and that the Nunavut Bureau of Statistics simply provides numbers for others to use, including other Nunavut government departments.

One undeniable change has been a surge in the numbers of people joining the Nunavut labour force since 1989.

Growing labour force

A key concept, the “labour force” means all those people aged 15 or over who are either employed or unemployed at the time of the survey. “Unemployed” means all those who had been looking for jobs in the four weeks prior to the survey — a definition that exclude a lot of residents who want jobs but can’t get any.

Nunavut’s labour force jumped from 7,091 people in the winter of 1989 to 10,904 people in the winter of 1999.

But the number of employed people also rose sharply — from 5,440 people in 1989 to 8,646 people in the winter of 1999. The biggest jump occurred between 1989 and 1994, when the number of employed people rose by 36.3 per cent.

Between 1994 and 1999, the number of employed people in Nunavut rose by 16.6 per cent.

In each of these two five-year periods, the rate of new job creation in Nunavut was slightly higher than the rate of increase in the size of Nunavut’s labour force.

As a result, Nunavut’s overall unemployment rate has declined slightly since 1989, when it stood at 23.3 per cent. In 1994, it dropped to 21.7 per cent, and fell to 20.7 per cent in 1999.

Hicks said, however, that the Bureau of Statistics has no accurate method of calculating the degree of transience in the work force. He said it’s impossible to say precisely how many new jobs have been taken by transient workers from the South.

The Nunavut Labour Force Survey reveals stark differences in labour market conditions among Nunavut communities.

For example, less than 35 per cent of the adult populations of Clyde River had jobs at the time of the survey, compared to more than 65 per cent of the adult population in Iqaluit, Rankin Inlet and Cambridge Bay.