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Alberta jobless rate balloons to 13.4% in April thanks to COVID-19 layoffs

Stats Canada releasing the unemployment figures for AprilĀ  Friday morning (May 8) and the numbers, as expected are staggering.

Unlike the month before, the April data takes into account one full month of job losses fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The agency says Canada’s unemployment rate in April jumped to 13%, a number not seen since 1982. More than one-third of the potential labour force in this country was either not working at all or working less than half the usual hours.

The numbers show another two million Canadians lost their jobs in April. Couple that with one million job losses in March and that adds up to 3 million people in this country unemployed directly linked to the pandemic.

Here in Alberta, the jobless rate was even worse than the national picture, ballooning to 13.4% last month.

Locally, the Lethbridge-Medicine Hat rate increased to 6.8% which is a jump of almost two percentage points from March.

The Red Deer region is experiencing Alberta’s worst unemployment right now, sitting at 11%.

Alberta Jobless Rate by Region April 2020

Lethbridge-Medicine Hat:Ā 6.8%
Camrose-Drumheller: 9.3%
Calgary: 10.8%
Banff-Jasper-Rocky Mountain House: 10.1%
Athabasca-Grande Prairie-Peace River: 10.1%
Red Deer: 11.0%
Edmonton: 10.1%
Wood Buffalo-Cold Lake: 7.9%

Patrick Siedlecki
Patrick Siedlecki
Pat has been a mainstay in the CJOC News department from the time the station launched in 2007. He's been in the position of News Director since then and has been anchoring daily news casts as well as reporting and working behind the scenes. Community is important to him and keeping CJOC listeners and readers informed about what's happening across southern Alberta and beyond. Pat has been in radio broadcasting for the past 24 years, starting in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island in 1997 and then moving up island to Nanaimo for another few years before heading to Lethbridge in 2007. Pat grew up in the small Saskatchewan farming town of Foam Lake. After high school, he went to Western Academy Broadcasting College (WABC) in Saskatoon prior to moving to the island. Pat also spent several years broadcasting hockey in the BCHL as well as seven years as the radio voice of the Lethbridge Hurricanes in the WHL. Pat has been working at Cornerstone Funeral Home in Lethbridge as a Certified Life Celebrant and Funeral Assistant since 2016. News and sports have always been Pat's passion from the time he was a teenager and he's always been grateful to have had the opportunity to make that part of what's been a fun and long radio career!
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