Work in progress

Staying put

Brendon Bernard, senior economist, Indeed.com

Canadian workers are switching jobs much less often than they did just a few years ago. In November, 2025, 0.4 per cent of Canadian workers changed jobs, according to Statistics Canada – down more than 40 per cent from the 0.7-per-cent monthly rate that prevailed at the same point in 2019. Part of the drop reflects fewer opportunities for job seekers, but it’s unclear if that’s the whole story. While the job vacancy rate was below its prepandemic level in 2025, the job switching rate was down by more.

Economic uncertainty might also be causing some people to stay put, although other drivers could be more benign. Our 2025 Indeed Workforce Insights Survey found that Canadian workers who weren’t actively searching for new work rated their employment situation substantially more positively than those who were. Still, a healthy rate of labour market churn is an important feature of a dynamic economy, so reversing the decline in the job switching rate will likely be an important part of getting the Canadian labour market out of its current funk.

Stress shopping

Carl Gomez, chief economist, CoStar

Surveys show that Canadians are concerned about the state of the economy and their personal finances. However, recent shopping patterns suggest otherwise. Over the past year, discretionary retail sales categories, such as clothing, shoes and jewellery, have performed quite well.

Part of this uptick is due to higher foot traffic thanks to rapid population growth. But it’s also been fuelled by a phenomenon known as “doom spending” – the act of spending money, often impulsively, to cope with stress and anxiety about economic or political uncertainty. This trend is notable among younger generations, who may feel that home ownership and a stable financial future are out of reach.

Although discretionary spending is expected to slow as population growth cools, doom spending could remain a key part of retailing, especially if young people continue to delay or forgo buying their first home.

Falling out of touch

Livio di Matteo, professor of economics, Lakehead University

The decline in Canadian travel to the U.S. in 2025 made headlines globally. Yet, the long-term picture of bilateral cross-border travel is more complicated. With 90 percent of Canada’s population within 100 kilometres of the U.S. border, more Canadians visit the U.S. than vice versa. Per capita, annual total trips over the 1990 to 2025 period to America by Canadians averaged 1.4, while Americans going the other way averaged 0.1. However, the pandemic notwithstanding, Canadian and American total trips have both trended down over the long run.

Increasing economic integration in the wake of the 1989 Free Trade Agreement and later NAFTA over the long term has paradoxically been accompanied by declining cross-border interaction. Borders are not just dividing lines. They are also zones of contact, communication and transit, and declining cross-border travel marks an increasing separation between the two countries’ peoples that predates the “elbows up” Trumpian tariff era.

Care-ing is sharing

Armine Yalnizyan, economist and Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers

For most Canadians, no economic issue shapes our lives more than how we earn a living. Tariffs and layoffs dominate headlines, and although the job picture has been better than expected, we’re overlooking the real reason why: a surge in employment in the care economy – health, social assistance and education.

Caring for others now makes up 21.5 per cent of all paid work, more than twice the second-largest job-rich sector: retail. Yet it’s not seen as either an economic engine or a sector in crisis. It is both. Demographics ensure it will keep growing. How it grows matters. The number and quality of care jobs will be key trends to watch in 2026.

Young man, there’s a reason to feel down

Mike Moffatt, founding director, Missing Middle Initiative

For the first time in Canadian history, men over the age of 65 earn, on average, more than their 25-to-34 year-old counterparts. Adjusted for inflation, the median and average incomes for senior men have increased by more than $23,000 since 1976 due to a combination of increased investment and pension income, more generous government transfers and the proportion of this group still earning labour income rising from 27 per cent to 36 per cent.

For younger men, on the other hand, average and median real incomes have fallen by more than $8,000. While much of this decline happened before 1995, incomes for this group have been stagnant for 25 years. A combination of some men staying in school longer and others dropping out of the labour force entirely due to job losses in traditional male industries, such as manufacturing, has led to the decline, even as buying a home requires a much higher income.

Eat, sleep, pay

Philip Smith, economic analyst and former assistant chief statistician, Statistics Canada

Affordability continues to be an important issue in Canada. Not only have shelter and food prices risen considerably, but borrowing costs and the unemployment rate are also higher than in the 2010s.

But it’s notable that comparing March, 2020, when the pandemic began, to October, 2025, wages have fully kept pace with the consumer price index, although it did take some time for them to catch up after the inflation surge in 2022.

Shelter and food prices have risen more rapidly though, and that is the main source of concern. For good reason, since these are the most life-essential consumption product categories.

Economists generally believe negative inflation is bad for the economy and for that reason the Bank of Canada’s target range is between 1 per cent and 3 per cent. But that doesn’t mean falling prices for specific products are undesirable. Food and shelter prices can be volatile at times, and perhaps their extraordinary rise in recent years will eventually be reversed.

In any case, it is fortunate the prices of other products, in aggregate, have increased a lot less rapidly than wages. That fact, at least, provides some offsetting benefit as we look ahead to the affordability issue in 2026.

Liberated from jobs

Derek Holt, head of capital markets economics, Scotiabank

Tariffs are boomeranging on the U.S. job market. Official U.S. non-farm payrolls have been moving sideways since President Trump’s so-called Liberation Day, which amplifies the relative underperformance of the U.S. job market to Canada, where jobs have been booming. Meanwhile, the adjusted U.S. non-farm numbers incorporate coming negative revisions dating back to April of 2024.

President Trump lauds the virtuous effects of tariffs for bringing home jobs. That isn’t happening. Greater uncertainty and tumbling confidence since the tariff wars began are reducing the hiring appetite on top of the effects of tighter U.S. immigration policy and a minimal effect to date from AI. The rapid year-over-year deceleration of U.S. job growth is flashing orange and correlates with the job markets that preceded past U.S. recessions. The affordability and job security concerns that Americans feel are real relative to the promises coming out of the White House. Mr. Trump may need to pivot very rapidly before the November, 2026, midterm elections.

Choose your own (jobs) adventure

Matt Lundy, economics editor, The Globe and Mail

How strong is Canada’s labour market, really? The Labour Force Survey, which is filled out by households, has recently shown a big rebound in hiring. But the Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours – which is based, in part, on administrative payroll data – shows a more subdued trend for job growth. It’s not shocking for these reports to show diverging trends, and there are key differences between the two. (For instance, the SEPH doesn’t cover self-employment.) But during a complicated trade war, it’s likely that one is overly optimistic or overly pessimistic about labour conditions. The coming year could deliver a verdict on what’s really happening.

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