Covid-19 Labour Market Developments in New Brunswick Compared to Canada

The present paper attempts to broadly examine whether New Brunswick's pandemic-related responses at the provincial level were successful or not through the assessment of New Brunswick's labour force performance since the start of the pandemic until December 2021 by comparing the latter to that of Canada during the same period. To do so, this paper attempts to show as well as explain some differences between New Brunswick's and Canada's changes pertaining to the prominent labour force characteristics including the size of population and labour force, participation rate, employment at absolute values, employment rate, unemployment at absolute values, unemployment rate, and GDP growth rate based on data published by Statistics Canada. Overall, New Brunswick appear to have a better labour force performance amidst the spread of the pandemic thanks to the timely implementation of stringent public health measures throughout the studied period despite having lower counts and ratios of officially reported deaths, hospitalizations, and infections. Also, the small number of airports with schedule flights coupled with the enactment of the Atlantic bubble agreement helped keep the number and contagion of visitors and newcomers on track, thus prevented the COVID-induced disruptions of the flows of goods and services, therefore optimized the provincial consumption, trades, and employment.