Unemployment only tells you who is eligible for EI funds. It in no way says what the employment levels are.

Facts are employment levels in PG have been on the decline for over a decade. PG actually lost 2500 jobs last year with a drop in unemployment due to less eligability for EI benefits and people leaving the work force all together.

In my opinion, the only people who should be unemployed are those who are unemployable. There are jobs everywhere in almost every industry. The unemployment rate should be 0 in this community. Chester

I agree, Chester.

I would think the unemployment rate in Prince George (with our many sawmills and the jobs which support these sawmills) will be going up significantly in the near future as a result of the housing (and mortgage market) meltdown in the United States.

This meltdown in the aforementioned markets has gotten so bad that it has precipitated a worldwide financial crisis (credit crunch) as evidenced by the fact that central banks all over the world (including Canada) last Thursday and Friday) had to inject a total of $320 Billion of liquidity (translated as more credit) into the financial markets to prop them up. (This makes me wonder how strong and sustainable our financial markets are over the long term if the world's central banks are so concerned about them they have to inject this much more credit into a market place which already has a staggering amount of credit behind it to keep it going)

With lenders tightening up on their lending as a result of this credit crunch, and declining home prices, this means a lot less homes are going to be built in the U.S. in the foreseeable future.

Stay tune to the financial markets in the days and weeks to come. The central banks in the world are going to have to do some pretty fancy stepping if they want to keep our "empire of debt" going a little bit longer"

The way I see it is that the fact that the unemployment rate is up a bit in PG especially during the summer months is because students are out there looking for summer employment. The high school grads and returning students for college and university will cause the rate to drop slightly to where it was, unless there is a cutback at some local mills which in turn will cause cutbacks in local support businesses.