Canada's economy added 378,000 new jobs in September, Statistics Canada says, almost all of which were full-time positions.

September's job gains mean that the job market is now within 720,000 positions of where it was in February, before the advent of COVID-19 in Canada.

March and April saw a cumulative record of three million jobs lost, before the numbers started to bounce back in June. Each month from then on has been slightly lower than the previous, until last month, when hiring seems to have picked up again.

Most of the new jobs were full-time work. Only about 44,000 of them were part-time. The gains were also more than twice as many as economists had been expecting.

September's hiring was enough to push the jobless rate down to 9 per cent. For context, in February, Canada's unemployment rate was 5.6 per cent, before COVID-19 walloped the economy, and pushed it up to a high of 13.7 per cent in May, the highest rate on record. It has fallen steadily in each of the four months since then.

The last time Canada's economy was hit by anything remotely similar to the impact of COVID-19 was the recession of 2008 and 2009. That time, the jobless rate was 6.2 per cent going into it, before peaking at 8.7 per cent eight months later in June 2009.

It took nine years for the rate to get back to where it was before.

Still not normal

While the job market is showing encouraging signs of recovering, it's still anything but normal.

About one-quarter of Canadians are still working from home. That's 4.2 million people and more than twice the number who normally do.

And while the economy is adding jobs, there are still 1.8 million people in Canada officially categorized as unemployed, which means they want a job but can't find one. And there are still 1.3 million workers affected by the COVID-19 economic shutdown, which means they are employed but working less than they'd like to or normally do.