Jenna,

A recent labor market trend is a rapidly rising number of people not in the labor force. There are millions of Canadians 16 years old or older that are not working fall into several categories: retirees, stay-at-home parents, students, and those who would prefer working but have given up on finding a job. Because government statistics do a very poor job of providing insight into how many of those not in the labor force are in each category, policy makers have been reduced to making educated guesses about the relative size of each subgroup of those not working and their potential to reenter the labor market as conditions improve.

Now, can you explain briefly how the Canadian government gets the data to calculate its unemployment rate? In what ways are the labour market structure not fully accounted for?