By Ketki Saxena
Investing.com -- The Canadian economy continues to remain resilient, despite the Bank of Canada's best efforts to cool the labour market, and excess demand in the economy as it seeks to combat inflation.
The Canadian economy added 60,000 jobs last month, as per data released by Statistics Canada - triple the number that economists had predicted.
The data is the latest in a series of indicators that imply the Canadian economy needs to cool further and raises bets that the Bank of Canada will hike rates at least one more time in July, by 25 bps.
"The data are probably just strong enough to see policymakers pull the trigger on another 25 basis-point interest rate hike next week, rather than wait until September as we had previously forecast,” stated CIBC (TSX:CM) economist Andrew Grantham in his report to investors.
Grantham also that he expects the forecasted July hike to take the BoC to its terminal rate, of 5.0%
One weak point in today's labour market data was the 0.2% rise in the unemployment rate to 5.4%. Even though it followed suit after May's similar increase, economists believe this won't deter Bank Of Canada from its cycle of rate hikes.
"The reason for this simultaneous rise can be traced back to our record-breaking population growth — including an unprecedented monthly increase of about 84k people during June,” explained RBC (TSX:RY) assistant chief economist Nathan Janzen while addressing clients."
In percentage terms, the Canadian population experienced moderate growth of around .03%, while the labour force grew .05%.