Alberta has made up just over half of the jobs it lost between February and April.

As of July, there were 187,000 more people employed in the province than in April. Unfortunately, we are still 174,000 jobs shy of where we were before the shutdowns aimed at containing COVID-19 began.

After contracting by 5.0 per cent in March and another 11.0 per cent in April, the number of jobs in the province increased by 1.4 per cent in May, by 4.6 per cent in June and by 3.2 per cent in July.

At about 60 per cent of the total, more of the jobs that have returned since April are part-time positions. There are still 150,000 full-time jobs that need to come back to reach the pre-COVID level compared to 23,000 part-time jobs.

The number of Albertans actively looking for work (i.e. unemployed) fell by 17.4 per cent in July from the peak reached in June. As a result, the unemployment rate went from 15.5 per cent in June to 12.8 per cent in July. This is, however, still 5.2 points higher than the rate in February.

Women have more ground to make up than men before getting back to pre-shutdown levels, but they did see a rise in employment in July of 4.3 per cent compared to 2.3 per cent for men.

Nationally, the unemployment rate went from 12.3 per cent in June to 10.9 per cent in July, but the country is still over 1.3 million jobs short of its pre-COVID level.