According to Statistics Canada, the unemployment rate in this country rose to 8% in March, with some 387,000 full-time jobs lost since last October. But the official unemployment rate is a weird and very narrowly defined statistic. It includes only “the percentage of the labour force that actively seeks work but is unable to find work at a given time.” If we add other groups of people that you and I would consider unemployed or underemployed — such as those who have given up looking for work altogether and those working part-time because they can’t find full-time work — the real unemployment rate for March is more like 12.4%. That translates into approximately 1,456,600 people without full-time jobs in Canada.

The real unemployment rate in the United States, by the way, is 15.6%, which works out to more than 13 million people. According to the Center for American Progress, more Americans have lost their jobs in the past year than at any other time since the government started tracking unemployment just after World War II.