I wouldn't dispute the empirical accuracy of the claim that net new jobs have been created and net new jobs are an important variable to follow. The question is, how do you appropriately interpret that measure? In a country like Canada, whose population is growing relatively quickly...we have one of the fastest rates of population growth in the industrialized world. Our labour force, or working-age population, grows by between 1.3% and 1.5% per year.
We have to be creating hundreds of thousands of net new jobs year after year just to keep up with that normal course of population growth. It's particularly important when you're making international comparisons. Think of a country like Germany, which has virtually no population growth. Canada has created net new jobs; Germany hasn't. But Canada has to create hundreds of thousands to keep up with population growth; Germany doesn't.
By a more appropriate measure, which is the number of jobs relative to the size of the working-age population, Germany's labour market has been much stronger than Canada's through the recession and the subsequent recovery. Their employment rate is actually higher than it was before the recession, whereas the graph I showed you shows that Canada's is still substantially lower than before the recession.
There is also an issue about the quality of jobs that is not captured either in the net new job measure or, frankly, in my graph. My graph just asks whether you're working or not. There has been some growth in part-time work and precarious work through that period. But I think the bigger issue is the context in which you interpret a statement like the number of net new jobs. Canada's labour market relative to our population is still far weaker, near the worst conditions at the bottom of the recession.