In the first of their series of briefs looking at the labour market impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, GLRC Director Luann Good Gingrich and Andrew Mitchell examine the impacts on immigrants using data from the monthly Labour Force Survey (LFS) conducted by Statistics Canada.
COVID-19 has revealed longstanding and multiple fissures in the Canadian labour market. As of the end of April, it was estimated that:
- 4 million people in Canada lost their jobs and income. The total number of people who have lost all or most of their employment income (counting those who are working few or no hours and are not getting paid, but are not officially unemployed) is estimated to be 6.6 million, or a 33.5% “realistic” unemployment rate (Stanford, 2020)
- The hardest hit are youth (ages 15 to 24) and recent immigrants (Labour Force Survey, April 2020)
- Especially in Canada’s urban centres, a disproportionate number of care workers – suddenly recognized to be “essential” and at high risk of infection – are immigrant women working low-wage, part-time and temporary jobs (Armstrong et al., 2020; Lightman, 2019; Tungohan, 2020; Turcotte & Savage, 2020).
In this brief we explore one important division: the differential impacts among Canadian-born (non-immigrants), long-term immigrants (those who landed more than 10 years previously), and more recent immigrants – those who landed 10 years or less previously.
We focus on those aged 15-64 using data from the monthly Labour Force Survey (LFS) conducted by Statistics Canada.