Article source: ConstructConnect
Statistics Canada’s new Labour Force Survey report expels the bad memories from the previous month. The -200,000 net jobs figure for January was pushed aside by the +337,000 number for February.
The services-producing sector, at +293,000 jobs, accounted for the bulk of the big employment increase, but construction made a strong showing as well, +37,000 jobs. In the first two months of this year, Canadian construction has added +60,000 positions.

Manufacturers held even with staffing (+1,000 jobs) in the latest month and they are now employing -9,000 workers compared with the end of last year.

Canada’s seasonally adjusted (SA) unemployment rate is 5.5%, which sits noticeably above the U.S. ‘headline’ rate of 3.8%. But when the not seasonally adjusted (NSA) calculation for Canada is altered to adopt the same methodological approach as utilized by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the NSA U rate north of the border becomes 4.5% compared with 4.1% in America. In other words, they’re basically indistinguishable.

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Article source: ConstructConnect

When talking with developers and design firms these days, the discussion will quickly turn to the extraordinarily rapid upticks in material and other construction input costs and how they are causing some owners to put project go-aheads on pause while they go back to their teams for suggestions on possible alterations that will return estimated costs closer to initial estimates.
For input prices (or costs, depending on one’s perspective), the most readily available and comprehensive data comes from the Producer Price Index (PPI) material published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Among the PPI series are two composite construction input cost series. For ease of identification, they appear as (A) and (B) in Table 1. (A) is the last line in the whole table and (B) is the top line in the ochre-shaded section.
There is decade’s worth of history for the index denoted by (A). But the number of material components that make up the composite result in (A) is quite limited. (B) is more comprehensive as to content, but it includes some items that aren’t strictly materials, such as transportation charges. Also, it has a shorter history.
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