Employment Numbers are down again in March - 357,000 jobs now lost in Canada.

Although employment losses are expected to continue for at least the next few months, there was a sliver of good news in the March report — the rate of job destruction appears to be slowing.

Canadian employment levels fell a more traumatic 82,600 in February and 129,000 in January. This pattern of diminishing layoffs is sharply different from the one driving U.S. job markets, which are continuing to slide each month at a constant rate.

The recession is attacking parts of Canada’s economy with disproportionate force. Private-sector employers shed nearly 68,000 jobs in March, while their public sector counterparts actually added 1,000 positions in the same month. There was also an increase of 5,200 self-employed Canadians.

The contrast between goods-producing and service industries was equally stark. The former trimmed 62,600 jobs in March, while employers specializing in services added 1,300.

The recession’s uneven impact was also evident within the services sector, where there were significant cuts in jobs involving real estate, hotels and food services, while employers in business and educational services did some hiring.

These patterns could be seen in Ottawa-Gatineau, where employers trimmed 6,300 jobs in March.

A detailed look, which requires using seasonally unadjusted data, shows the national capital region lost 10,200 jobs between March 2008 and March 2009 — an employment decline of 1.5 per cent.

However, the overall average disguised some dramatic swings within the area job market. The manufacturing sector in Ottawa-Gatineau — which incudes high-technology firms — saw year-over-year employment declines of 12 per cent. Jobs in retail and wholesale trade fell nearly 19 per cent.

At the same time, the number employed in educational services was up 12.7 per cent from March 2008 to March 2009, and the public administration sector padded their job rolls by five per cent.

Since last October, when Canada’s employment levels peaked at 17.2 million, the recession has played out very differently by region.

In all, nearly 357,000 jobs have been lost — with Ontario bearing the brunt. Although the province accounts for just 39 per cent of the country’s population, it has suffered 48 per cent of the cumulative shrinkage in Canada’s job market.

Ontario’s manufacturing firms contributed heavily to the bleeding — indeed, were shedding jobs long before October 2008.

More recently, however, Alberta and B.C. have seen their employers trim staff at a furious rate. Alberta, with 10.5 per cent of Canada’s population, accounted for 13.5 per cent of all jobs lost from October to March. B.C. also lost a disproportionate share.

The western provinces had been doing exceptionally well until the autumn, when energy prices fell at a dramatic rate.

Several regions continue to support relatively strong employment markets. For instance, the major Atlantic cities —Halifax, Saint John and St. John’s — reported higher employment in March than they did last October. Regina, Winnipeg and Saskatoon were also in this camp — thanks largely to agriculture and related industries that have not been as hard hit as the energy and auto sectors.

Ottawa-Gatineau’s job market has declined three per cent over the same five-month period. Among the worst-hit cities so far in the recession are those with a big manufacturing base — such as Oshawa (where employment was down 5.5 per cent), Kitchener (down 3.3 per cent) and Windsor (down 3.1 per cent).

With signs the U.S. banking systems may at last be stabilizing, there’s hope that the United States’ economy will begin to revive.

Until it does, it will not be easy to arrest the downward momentum in Canada’s job market.

In the past five months, employment collapsed at a much faster rate than at a similar stage during the recession of 1982 — and that remains Canada’s worst economic downturn since the Second World War.

Consider that from October to March, Canada’s employment levels tumbled 2.1 per cent. During the first five months of the 1982 recession the number of jobs contracted only 0.8 per cent. Employment continued falling another 12 months before finally bottoming out.

If you have been terminated and need to speak with a lawyer please do not hesitate to call Matt Lalande at Haber and Associates or email him at matt.lalanade@haber-lawyer.com.