Employers continue to report challenges filling positions, yet growth in wages is slow, according to StatCan data. The average hourly wage in July was $29.19, up 1.1 percent from the beginning of 2021 but only 0.3 percent since April of last year. “All of these anecdotes about restaurants offering $30 an hour for someone to wash dishes, that’s not showing up at all in the actual empirical data,” economist Jim Stanford told the Globe and Mail.
The effects of the pandemic have distorted the relevant figures, making meaningful analysis difficult. As a result, StatCan adjusted the data, treating them as if the distribution of workers by field and time in post were the same as in 2019. That adjustment showed wages growing more slowly than official figures have indicated, though the gap between the two metrics has narrowed in recent months.
