Can you guess how job numbers changed under Harper and Trudeau?

Over the last two decades, both Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau presided over labour markets hit with once-in-a-generation economic shocks. For Harper, that disruption was the 2008 financial crisis, and for Trudeau it was the COVID-19 pandemic.

In both cases, things started out with a relatively stable period of employment before a stark spike in the unemployment rate. In Harper’s era, unemployment was near historic lows in the fall of 2008; in the year that followed, 400,000 jobs were lost. For Trudeau, the pandemic led to the shutting down of the entire economy, costing roughly 3.4 million jobs and resulting in a 20 per cent decline in employment across the country.

Economists who study the labour market note that while both economies recovered their initial job losses, the recovery from the pandemic and from the 2008 financial crisis were very different.

The 2008 financial crisis was more like a traditional recession than the pandemic downturn because once it was over, demand rose slowly, with jobs and wages returning to strength at the same slow pace, according to Rafael Gomez, a University of Toronto professor and labour market expert.

The pandemic, he says, was unlike any other downturn because once it was over, demand exploded. People had money and they wanted to buy goods, take advantage of services and travel again. The problem was finding the employees to meet that demand.

“There were fewer workers coming out of the pandemic than went in,” Gomez told CBC News. With fewer employees able to meet swiftly rising demand, the federal government decided to expand the temporary foreign worker program to fill the gap.

Statistics Canada said that by the end of 2023, there were more than 2.5 million non-permanent residents in the country — a class that includes international students and temporary foreign workers — compared to just 1.3 million in the fall of 2021.