12:26 PM EST, 01/09/2026 (MT Newswires) -- The Toronto Stock Exchange is up near 290 points midday on Friday with most sectors higher.

The best performers are materials and energy, up 2% and 1.6%, followed by technology, up 0.9%,

The sole decliner is healthcare, which is down 1.4%.

On the economic front, focus was on the release of Canadian employment data for December. "After a couple of sky high hiring prints, Canada's labour market came back down to earth in December," said Royce Mendes over at Desjardins. The economy added just 8,000 jobs during the month, slightly outpacing expectations for a mild contraction. Job gains were focused in full-time employment, reversing some of the losses from prior months.

The unemployment rate jumped three ticks to 6.8%. But, Mendes said, even that deterioration was mostly due to more people looking for work, with the participation rate rising to 65.4% from 65.1%. "That's obviously a much better driver of the unemployment rate than job losses," Mendes added, while noting with the jobless rate back up to 6.8%, "there's clearly more slack in the economy" than what was indicated in the November Labour Force Survey, where the unemployment rate briefly fell to 6.5%.

Population growth, Mendes also noted, slowed to a crawl in the December employment data. The population of 15 years and older matched its slowest growth rate on record, posting an increase of just 0.03%, last seen during the depths of the pandemic. Given that the latest quarterly population estimate showed outright declines in the size of the population, it wouldn't be surprising to see the Labour Force Survey begin posting population declines in the months to come, he said.

"While hiring was soft and the unemployment rate rose, the survey wasn't weak enough to alter expectations for the Bank of Canada. Central bankers are likely to reiterate that they believe the current interest rate setting is still "at about the right level to keep inflation close to 2% while helping the economy through this period of structural adjustment."

After a string of upside surprises, the Canadian labour market gave back some of its gains in December, with job growth effectively petering out, and the unemployment rate ticking higher as more people started looking for work, was how TD Economics summed the data release up.

According to TD, this report is unlikely to move the needle for the BoC. "There is still slack in the labour market, but uncertainty about the supply side of the economy and the risk to inflation means they are unlikely to tip the policy rate into accommodative territory," it added.

Reuters also reports that the U.S. Supreme Court did not release a ruling on the legality of Trump's sweeping global tariffs today.