Canada steps out: a labour market gearing up and fresh trade paths

Canada’s trade landscape is shifting again and the pace is starting to show. Mark Carney keeps adding small but tangible pieces to his diversification strategy. The agreement with the UAE, the recent work on closer ties with Indonesia and India, the Gripen framework in Sweden (with an estimated 10,000+ potential jobs), and several other negotiations may look modest when taken one by one. Once combined, they signal a steady move away from over reliance on a single trading partner. None of this replaces the United States in the short term but each deal adds a little more surface area for Canadian supply chains and each creates new pockets of hiring. The growing use of Buy Canadian criteria inside federal procurement is reinforcing this momentum. Local suppliers are beginning to see more visibility and more routes into government projects and that often translates into more stable orders and more demand for talent.

This week we also released a deep dive on technical skill shortages across major Canadian cities. The findings are quite stark. Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, and Montreal are all wrestling with clusters of high need and low supply in areas such as cloud engineering, data security, advanced analytics, and automation. The pace of digital transformation slowed a bit last year but the pressure on qualified talent has not. This special report brings a city by city view of the severity scores and the underlying drivers, which should help staffing firms and hiring managers adjust their strategies for the coming quarters.

The latest Business Outlook Survey aligns closely with our own CSJ Press review of active hiring signals across provinces and industries. The patterns are converging. Firms report modest improvements in demand, a slow clearing of inventories, and better visibility on near term sales. At the same time, the CSJ pulse on job postings and employer sentiment shows concentrated hiring activity in manufacturing, logistics, health care, and professional services. None of this points to a surge but the direction is firmer than earlier this year. In several cases, the BOS narrative matches what our Hiring Index has been capturing since late summer.

Finally, we published a timely analysis on the rise of shadow AI. Workers are adopting these tools faster than their employers can monitor or regulate. The productivity gains are real but so are the risks, especially for data protection and intellectual property. Companies that wait too long to formalize usage guidelines will find themselves reacting to problems rather than shaping safe practices. The faster pace of worker led adoption is turning this into a structural issue for cybersecurity and compliance.

There is a lot happening at once but the direction is becoming clearer. More trade lanes, better signals on hiring, tighter conditions for tech talent, and a growing gap between how employees and employers handle AI. Canada is moving through a complicated adjustment but the ingredients for steadier labour demand are starting to line up.

Minh Dang - Editor in chief

Top stories this week