Prince George, B.C. – The year over year unemployment rate for May in Prince George remained steady.

Statistics Canada labour analyst Vincent Ferrao says there were 46,500 people working last month compared to 45,600 a year ago.

“So there’s a little bit of an increase in the number of people working but that was not enough to change the unemployment rate which remained at 6.6%.”

As for the Cariboo region as a whole he says the unemployment rate was 7%, a slight improvement from 7.7% a year ago.

“There was virtually no change. 77,600 people were employed this May, 77,700 a year ago but there were fewer people looking for work so that brought the unemployment rate down.”

Regionally he says the manufacturing, educational services and professional, scientific and technical sectors were all up a bit while retail and wholesale trade were down.

Provincially Ferrao says B.C.’s unemployment rate remained unchanged year over year at 6.1%.

He says a 3% bump in the number of people employed (70,000) was offset by an increase in the number of people looking for work.

And federally, he says the unemployment rate dropped slightly from 7% down to 6.9% though the level of growth over 12 months was much slower than B.C.

“Employment over 12 months grew by less than 1. % and that’s about 109,000 people.”