The Labour Force Survey (LFS) is a monthly personal, telephone or online survey carried out by Statistics Canada. The LFS is the only source of current, monthly estimates of total employment and unemployment. The main objective of the LFS is to divide the working-age population into three mutually exclusive classifications - employed, unemployed, and not in the labour force - and to provide descriptive and explanatory data on each of these. The main strength of the LFS is the timeliness of the data on the labour market, including the unemployment rate and demographic analysis. While LFS is best known for the unemployment rate, it also produces a great deal of information on a variety of labour-related issues, such as job creation, education and training, retirement pensions and income support.
The survey is conducted in approximately 56,000 households across Canada. Information is obtained from all members of the selected household who are 15 years old and older, whether they work or not, resulting in the collection of labour market information for approximately 100,000 individuals. Excluded from the survey are: persons living on reserves and other Aboriginal settlements in the provinces; full-time members of the Canadian Armed Forces, the institutionalized population, and households in extremely remote areas with very low population density. These groups together represent an exclusion of less than 2% of the Canadian population aged 15 and over.
For more information on the Labour Force Survey, see http://www.statcan.gc.ca/eng/survey/household/3701.