Labour and Language of Work – 2021 Census promotional material

Quick facts

• In the face of population aging and the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of health care workers increases by over 200,000 in five years to 1.5 million in 2021.
• The construction industry, with over 1.3 million workers, continues to be an important employer for men, who work mostly as labourers and in skilled trades.
• Growth in professional, scientific and technical services employment outpaces that of all other industries, with 1.5 million employed in 2021.
• Four million Canadians are working in sales and service occupations.
• The participation rate fell from 65.2% in 2016 to 63.7% in 2021 as more baby boomers near or enter retirement age.
• From 2016 to 2021, a record 1.3 million new immigrants came to Canada seeking opportunities, boosting labour market growth.
• Recent immigrants in 2021 experienced lower unemployment rates than earlier cohorts.
• Participation rates increased from 2016 to 2021 for many racialized groups, with notable increases for Korean and West Asian Canadians.
• Participation rates declined for First Nations people and Inuit as their labour force growth lags behind their population increases.
• In Canada's biggest cities, employment rates in 2021 are highest among those in Quebec and the Prairies.
• The information and communication technology sector is a key employer in six Canadian high-tech hubs, and employed more than 600,000 workers nationally in 2021.
• In May 2021, there were 4.2 million people working at home, up from 1.3 million in 2016.
• Working at home is most prominent in big cities and among people in professional occupations—with over 5% of teleworkers relocating from where they lived 12 months earlier.
• Despite a record-high number and share of Canadians speaking a non-official language at home, English and French remained the languages of convergence in workplaces across the country as 98.7% of workers used one of these two languages most often at work. Overall, 77.1% of workers mainly used English at work, 19.9% mainly used French, and 1.7% used English and French equally.

Resources

• The Daily - Jobs in Canada: Navigating a Changing Labour Market
• Census in Brief: Speaking of work: languages used at work across Canada

Social media content

Statistics Canada encourages our community supporters to post our content and images to their own social media accounts. You can save the images to your device and copy and paste the text content to your social media platforms to share.

Web Images

Labour Tile (JPG, 111 KB)

Terms of use

See the terms of use for information on the approved use of official wordmarks, identifiers and content.