OTTAWA — The Bank of Canada is increasingly expected to keep its benchmark interest rate on hold later this month after the labour market delivered a surprise hiring surge in June.
Statistics Canada said Friday that the unemployment rate dropped a tenth of a percentage point to 6.9 per cent in June as the economy added some 83,000 jobs.
The vast majority of those jobs were part-time, the agency said.
A Reuters poll of economists heading into Friday’s release had expected the jobless rate would rise to 7.1 per cent in June as employment levels held flat.
Katherine Judge, senior economist at CIBC, said in an interview that while
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