TORONTO: The Canadian dollar held its own against a broadly stronger US dollar on Friday after domestic and US data both showed solid jobs growth, while a rebound in China's major stock indexes helped sentiment and crude oil prices rose.
Canada added a greater-than-expected 22,800 jobs in December, in part making up for heavy losses in the previous month, while the unemployment rate stayed at 7.1 percent.
"The story of resilient Canadian job markets generally continues, but I think the underlying details were much softer than the headline on this one," said Derek Holt, vice president of economics at Scotiabank.
Meanwhile, US job growth surged in December and employment for the prior two months was revised sharply higher, suggesting that a recent manufacturing-led slowdown in economic growth would be temporary.
Helping Chinese stocks, Beijing ditched a circuit breaker mechanism that halted trading twice this week and the People's Bank of China raised its guidance rate for the yuan for the first time in nine trading days.
At 9:21 a.m. EST (1421 GMT), the Canadian dollar was trading at C$1.4096 to the greenback, or 70.94 US cents, little changed from the Bank of Canada's official close of $1.4097, or 70.94 US cents.
The currency's strongest level of the session was C$1.4058, while its weakest level was C$1.4127. On Thursday, it hit its weakest since July 2003 of C$1.4170.
Against the euro, the Canadian dollar firmed to C$1.5330. It hit C$1.5433 on Thursday, its weakest since Aug. 25 last year.
US crude prices were up 0.15 percent at $33.32 a barrel, while Brent crude added 0.39 percent to $33.88.
Canadian government bond prices were lower across the maturity curve on the solid jobs data and reduced safe-haven demand, with the two-year price down 6.5 Canadian cents to yield 0.45 percent and the benchmark 10-year falling 25 Canadian cents to yield 1.351 percent.
The Canada-US two-year bond spread was 1.6 basis points narrower at -56.1 basis points, while the 10-year spread was 0.5 of a basis point narrower at -82.4 basis points as Canadian government bonds underperformed.
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