People are very familiar with the unemployment rate in Canada and quickly look to it as an indicator of how easy it is to find work. This is not always representative of the experiences of the job seeker in rural and northern Manitoba. Statistics Canada (2005) explained that “the Labour Force Survey (LFS) is the household survey which produces Canada’s official unemployment rate” (p. 19). This report described the LFS in relationship to Aboriginals on and off reserves in Canada and explained that only since April of 2004 has the Manitoba government “added two questions to allow Aboriginal people living off reserve to identify themselves” (p. 19). However, it must be noted that the LFS excludes “Aboriginal peoples living on reserve and on Métis settlements” (p. 19).

It appeared these ECs’ client group are not even included in the statistical data, so I went seeking the parameters of the unemployment rate. The Government of Canada’s (2007) information pages produced an important definition:

The unemployment rate is the percentage of the labour force that actively seeks work but is unable to find work at a given time. Discouraged workers—persons who are not seeking work because they believe the prospects of finding it are extremely poor—are not counted. (¶ 1)

This was further evidence that we really do not have a picture of how bad the situation might be for job seekers in rural and northern Manitoba. Jones and Riddell (1999) provided a way of seeing employment as attachment to the labour market that might better describe the situation for the rural and northern Aboriginal job seeker. The report explained,

The central idea being that individuals in one group are classified as being more attached to the labour force state than those in another group if they display a greater likelihood of being employed in some future period, and a lower probability of labour force withdrawal. (p. 24)

The EC deals with many factors while matching individuals to jobs, and often their clients need referral to training or other services before they are ready to work. Peruniak (2004) presented a summary of rural ECs’ discussion about meeting the needs of clients: “Meeting basic needs was a precondition to employment.… Those who were preoccupied with food, shelter and security concerns were not ready to talk to a career practitioner unless it was about these worries” (p. 3).