In the most recent issue of Canadian Edge, we wrote about what we believed was a dismal July employment report, noting that there wasn’t much we could say to sugarcoat our disappointment. But it turns out Statistics Canada (StatCan) made an enormous error in its initial report of these data.

Instead of job growth being essentially flat for the month, as StatCan first reported, Canada’s economy actually added nearly 42,000 jobs in July, blowing past economists’ consensus forecast of 20,000 jobs.

The unemployment rate remains unchanged from the earlier report, ticking lower by a tenth of a point, to 7.0 percent. But the labor force participation rate held steady at 66.1 percent, instead of declining by two-tenths of a point, as was first reported.

Although we’re certainly relieved by this significant revision, our excitement is somewhat tempered by the underlying data.

Mainly, the revised results were still driven by part-time employment, which jumped by almost 60,000 jobs, after falling by 43,000 the prior month. These figures were essentially unchanged from the first report.

Part-time jobs are considered to be of lesser quality due to lower pay and higher turnover. So in general, we’d prefer to see job creation coming from the net addition of full-time positions.

And while the big adjustment in the revision was on the full-time employment front, full-time jobs still fell, though thankfully by a fraction of what was initially reported: The revised numbers show full-time jobs dropped by 18,100, instead of plummeting by 59,700.

Since a revision naturally causes one to review subsequent data with a more skeptical eye, economists with CIBC World Markets caution that July’s data show a steep climb in education jobs, which rose 46,000 month over month.

They note that shifts in the timing of teacher contracts make it difficult for StatCan to adjust for seasonality. As such, there could be a big drop in this category in the months ahead.

At the same time, CIBC says that a decline of similar magnitude in the construction sector (down by 39,000 jobs in July) could very well be reversed in subsequent months, thus offsetting any drop in education employment.

The revision also didn’t change the fact that the vast majority of Canada’s job growth over the trailing-year period has occurred from part-time jobs. The country’s total employment has risen by 0.9 percent over this period, or by nearly 157,000 positions, with the number of part-time jobs up 3.6 percent, while full-time jobs have risen by just 0.3 percent.

The number of hours worked, which can be a gauge of future employment demand, was up by just 0.3 percent from a year ago.

So while Canada’s employment situation is hardly robust, at the very least much of the inexplicably precipitous drop in full-time jobs that was first reported for July has since been reversed.

Interestingly, when StatCan adjusts its data based on how the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) crunches data for its own employment report, Canada’s employment rate is still slightly lower than the US. Based on the US approach, StatCan says the unemployment rate in Canada was 6.1 percent in July, compared with 6.2 percent in the US.

Even so, US job gains have shown far greater momentum, with the US unemployment rate falling by 1.1 percentage points over the trailing year versus just two-tenths of a point for Canada. Of course, Canadian policymakers are hoping the country can ride the coattails of a resurgent US economy, so a strengthening US job market is welcome news.

Finally, before anyone gets too conspiratorial with regard to major revisions to key economic data reported by government agencies and other entities, The Wall Street Journal observes that while such restatements are certainly noteworthy, they’ve happened at the BLS, which keeps a log of such errors on its public website, as well as at the Institute for Supply Management, among others.

Even with all the automation of recent years, there’s still going to be the occasional human error.

In a special statement, StatCan said that the error occurred because one of the programs it used was not updated when it implemented a new processing system in July. As a result, certain respondents who were actually employed with full-time jobs were not counted as such.

Though the agency believes it has pinpointed the error and that mistakes were limited to its July survey, it has still undertaken an internal review to ensure they’ve caught everything and that it doesn’t happen again.