The economy added 18,000 jobs in the month as the employment rate ticked up 0.1 percentage points and unemployment ticked down 0.1 percentage points to 6.5 per cent, the agency’s labour force survey found. (The Logic)

Talking point: The essentially flat headline numbers masked a shift in employment from the public sector (which lost 31,000 jobs) to the private sector (which gained 32,000), as gains in the hospitality sector helped offset losses in tariff-slammed manufacturing. Statistics Canada noted that over the previous year, nearly all the net jobs added to the economy were private—94,000 out of 99,000. Students also had a somewhat easier time finding summer jobs than in 2025, though their unemployment rate was still higher in June than in the same month in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, judged RBC assistant chief economist Nathan Janzen, “Canada’s economy is broadly still improving on a per-person and per-worker basis.”