The Canadian economy saw another strong month of job gains in September, adding 53,700 positions to establish its best opening nine months of a year since 2002.

Here’s a round-up of expert commentary on what the gains mean for the strength of the Canadian economy and how it could potentially sway the Bank of Canada’s interest rate plans.

“Canada's labour market seems to have been vaccinated against the global economic flu going around … with resources a key exception, the 12-month trends are generally healthy, and average wages for permanent workers were up 4.3 per cent from a year ago, a figure that does look suspiciously high but does signal a firming in pay scales.”

- Avery Shenfeld, managing director and chief economist, CIBC Capital Markets

“Hot dog. We're running out of superlatives to describe Canadian job market performance. While you could find some blemishes if you dug hard enough (the drop in private-sector jobs made up for by self-employment), for all intents and purposes this was a great report, especially following last month's barnburner.”

- James Marple, senior economist, TD Economics

“This blew my socks off again. I did not expect this. I came in today wearing the black tie and the black flower thinking that we were going to see a correction. This is definitely much better than I think most of The Street expected ... The interesting thing, of course, is we’re seeing these types of job gains without the productivity gains that we should be seeing in the overall economy. We’re seeing sort of a sectoral rotation within the Canadian economy away from the sort of manufacturing and high tech sectors and toward health care and the sort of low productivity sectors of the economy. That sort of tends to suppress wage gains, but it certainly keeps more Canadians employed.”

- Karl Schamotta, chief market strategist, Cambridge Global Payments

“The big Canadian jobs machine just keeps chugging along, giving no sense that the economy is on the cusp of an imminent downturn.”

- Doug Porter, chief economist, BMO Capital Markets

“Continued strong employment growth further reduces the chance of the Bank of Canada cutting interest rates at its meeting later this month. But if the data begin to deteriorate from here as we expect, then the Bank is still likely to cut interest rates in the coming months. We expect the first cut in December.”

- Stephen Brown, senior Canada economist, Capital Economics