So the Bank of Canada lowers rates in a surprise announcement on Jan. 21, and then Statistics Canada reports a seemingly impressive headline number for January job creation. Surely monetary policy doesn’t flow through the economy quite that quickly, right?

Indeed, central bankers say that the full effect of a change in interest rates typically takes about 18 months to work its way through the economy.

Or maybe the Canadian economy is actually doing better than the country’s policymakers thought?

Probably not: A slightly deeper dig into January’s jobs numbers shows that all of the growth came from part-time employment. Part-time jobs are generally considered to be of lesser quality than full-time jobs, owing to lower pay, fewer benefits and higher turnover.

But before we get to some of the more discouraging details, let’s take a moment to bask in the glow of the headlines.

Statistics Canada reported that the economy added 35,400 jobs in January, a welcome reprieve from the two preceding months of consecutive job losses. That result also blew past economists’ consensus forecast that just 5,000 new jobs would be created.

The unemployment rate ticked lower, to 6.6%, matching October’s post-Global Financial Crisis low.

But as noted earlier, the underlying data aren’t nearly as cheery. After four months of strong gains in full-time jobs, the economy lost 11,800 full-time positions in January.

Meanwhile, the economy added 47,200 part-time jobs in January, though not quite enough to offset the two prior months in which the country lost a total of 88,300 part-time workers.

The good news, at least, is that full-time job creation is still outpacing part-time job creation, even though both numbers are declining.

Over the trailing three-year period, the economy added an average of 13,300 full-time jobs per month and 4,000 part-time jobs per month. By contrast, over the trailing year the number of full-time jobs created has dropped to an average of 9,000 per month, while part-time jobs were created at an average of 1,700 per month.

StatCan also breaks down the employment data by the number of paid versus self-employed. Here, the data for January are even less encouraging. While the number of paid workers actually fell by 5,600, the ranks of the self-employed rose by 41,100.

Of course, self-employment can be a good thing for the economy, particularly when an entrepreneur establishes a business that proves successful enough to employ others, not to mention the potential wealth creation that results from bringing innovative products or ideas to the marketplace.

But economists have observed that rising self-employment typically occurs during downturns. And while a previous study by StatCan has showed that the paid and self-employed have roughly equal average incomes, the average obscures the wider degree of variation in incomes among the latter.

In other words, the higher incomes of successful business owners are masking the lower incomes of non-incorporated self-employed. As a result, economists tend to see an increasing number of self-employed as a worrisome indicator for income growth.

The total number of hours worked, which can augur future demand for labor, was up 0.3%. That’s nothing to get excited about, though it’s the second monthly increase after the sharp 0.8% drop in November.

Given crude’s collapse, we’ll also be more closely monitoring employment data from the resource-rich province of Alberta. On a year-over-year basis, provincial employment in natural resources was little changed, though it’s fallen by 13,000, or 7.2%, from its peak last September.

With these numbers in hand, economists expect another rate cut from the Bank of Canada at its next meeting in March.