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Toronto: Canada lost a record 129,000 jobs last month as the unemployment rate surged more than half a point to 7.2 per cent, the single-worst monthly job loss figure in the country's history.

The numbers are far worse than the 40,000 job losses economists expected and outpace losses in Canada's two previous recessions in the 1980s and 1990s.

Statistics Canada began taking a labour force survey in 1976. Danielle Zietsma, a spokeswoman for Statistics Canada, said the agency does not have comparable data from before 1976 but said January's figures are a record for the number of jobs lost in a single month. Canada's labour market was much smaller during the Great Depression of the 1930s.


"Nobody was even looking for anything close to this," said Craig Wright, chief economist at the Royal Bank of Canada. "Perhaps firms are looking at the gloom around the global economy, and all the gloom in the US and saying even if we haven't felt it just yet, it's coming so let's get ready for it."

Wright said the country is witnessing a complete collapse in confidence and unprecedented uncertainty.

"It's just big, sharp and ugly," Wright said.

Wright said the US-equivalent based on labour market size would be 1.3 million jobs lost. He said that the US labour market is about 10 times the size of Canada's. "In that sense the US actually outperformed Canada," he said.

The US lost 598,000 jobs in January, the most since the end of 1974, with the unemployment rate jumping to 7.6 per cent.

Statistics Canada reported on Friday that the cuts in Canada brought to 213,000 the number of jobs the economy has shed in the past three months. That wiped out all the jobs gained from earlier in 2008.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said his Conservative government would not alter its $32 billion (Dh117.53 billion) economic stimulus package unveiled last month despite the dire jobs report.

"We will not be blown off track every time there is some bad news," Harper said when asked about opposition calls to expand the stimulus programme. "We cannot have in Parliament, quite frankly, instability every week and every month, every time there's a new number, people demanding a different plan. This is a massive stimulus plan."

Harper said he anticipates more job losses to come but said the more troubling news came from the United States which posted even larger job losses than the previous month. Canada's economy is largely dependent on what happens in the United States. Nearly 80 per cent of Canada's trade is with its southern neighbour.

"The United States remains the epicentre of this particular crisis and this remains very troubling," Harper said.