The number of unfilled work positions in Alberta fell to 1.6 per cent in August, the lowest level it’s been since 2011 when Statistics Canada started tracking it. It’s also at the level of the national average, making Alberta’s labour market appear to be much more ordinary than it was even a year ago. (See graph below.)

For the second quarter of 2015, Statistics Canada reported this morning that Alberta’s job vacancy rate was 3.4 per cent. (The quarterly jobless rate is always higher than the monthly rate because over a three-month period, there are going to be more jobs vacant at some point than during only one month.) That tied us with New Brunswick for the highest in the country.

According to the release this morning, “the job vacancy rate refers to the share of jobs that are unfilled out of all payroll jobs available. It represents the number of job vacancies expressed as a percentage of labour demand; that is, the sum of all occupied and vacant jobs.”

The higher levels of job vacancy in Alberta over the last several years illustrates how tight the labour market was then—and the difficulty that some employers had filling jobs. In this respect, today’s lower job vacancy rate is beneficial to companies because it’s now easier to find qualified applicants.

But the job vacancy rate isn’t low everywhere in Alberta. Canada’s highest job vacancy rate in the second quarter was in Banff–Jasper–Rocky Mountain