It is clearly a much better picture, and appears to be mostly genuine. It shows employers have come back so much and are starting to rehire.

You create this class of people who essentially become permanently unemployed and can’t get back in. You have people who have lost contact with the labor market, whose skills are not relevant for jobs for the future, who employers regard with skepticism because they have been out of work for so long.

—Nigel Gault, IHS

With firms seeing profits improving we’re starting to see a much brighter labor market. Confidence has been restored and firms now have started to redeploy their cash.

—Stefane Marion, chief economist at National Bank Financial in Montreal