The Mining Association of Canada | The Canadian Mining Story: Economic Impacts and Drivers for the Global Energy Transition 2023 36 EMPLOYMENT The mining industry directly employed 403,000 people in 2021, accounting for roughly one in every 51 Canadian jobs. Indirect employment added another 263,000 jobs, for a total of 665,000 jobs in 2021. This represents one in 31 people in the Canadian labour force. Employment by subsector and product group is shown in Figure 2. The majority of employment in the sector is in downstreammanufacturing: metal products like steel pipe, cutlery, and cable. Primary manufacturing makes up 22% of the employment in the sector, and extraction makes up 18%. Services is the smallest subsector, at 8% of the overall sectoral employment. More recent data shows that employment in the sector has risen quickly in the postpandemic era. There was a historic rise in employment in the mining and quarrying sector from January to December, 2022: the workforce grew by more than 50% during this period. Unemployment remains low in the Canadian economy, but the unemployment rate for the mining sector is even lower. In December 2022, the unemployment rate for mining and quarrying was 3.9%, and for support services in mining was 2%. These low rates, below the national level for all industries, mean that the industry has begun to exhaust its labour pool. The tight labour market is an increasing challenge for mining employers: it drives up recruitment costs and wages and increases the need for competitors to inefficiently poach talent from each other. These employment trends require solutions to build a more sustainable, competitive and diverse labour market that is better able to respond to the short-term acute needs of the industry. Figure 2: Employment in Mining, 2012-202126 Extraction Services Primary Manufacturing DownstreamManufacturing 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 0 100 200 300 400 500 26 Statistics Canada; Natural Resources Canada. Table 36-10-0489-01.
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