Canada's economy churned out a better-than-expected 22,400 new jobs in November, but the unemployment rate ticked up slightly as more people were looking for work, Statistics Canada reported Friday.

Last month's jobless rate was 6.3 per cent, up one-tenth of a percentage point from October.

Economists had been expecting about 15,000 new jobs would be created.

Statistics Canada said November's job growth was in part-time work as the number of full-time jobs actually fell.

Alberta continued to be a jobs hot spot, adding 10,000 new jobs. Since the start of the year, the province has added 112,000 jobs — 40 per cent of the country's total job creation. Alberta's unemployment continues to be the lowest among all the provinces, at 3.1 per cent.

Nova Scotia enjoyed the biggest drop in unemployment. Its jobless rate fell 0.8 percentage points to 7.4 per cent. That's a 30-year low.

Ontario added 19,000 new jobs, all of them part time. But its jobless rate remained at 6.4 per cent. Since the start of the year, weakness in manufacturing has held job creation in the province to 71,000.

As for the manufacturing sector, it saw a rare increase last month, as 13,200 factory jobs were added to the nation's payrolls. However, in the past year, 72,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared as exporters struggle to deal with the high Canadian dollar.

The healthiest job sector so far this year has been natural resources — employment has risen by 36,000, or 11.8 per cent. Most of that growth has been concentrated in Alberta and British Columbia, home to the booming oil, natural gas and mining sectors.

In a commentary, Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist for BMO Nesbitt Burns, said he expects the rate of job creation to ease.

"The underlying slowdown in economic growth has yet to make a significant dent in Canadian job creation," he said.  "We suspect the jobs bonanza of recent years will prove very tough to repeat in 2007."

But Porter said the Bank of Canada will welcome news that the rise in average hourly wages for permanent workers slowed to a two-year low of 2.8 per cent, well down from the recent peak of four per cent in the summer. He said that raises the odds that core inflation will moderate in 2007 as the economy slows down.

The Bank of Canada issues its next interest rate policy announcement on Tuesday. No change is expected.