The Bank of Canada raised its prime interest rate throughout 1980 and early 1981 in an attempt to rein in inflation, with the deeper second portion of the early 1980s recession beginning in July 1981. The Bank of Canada interest rate peaked at 21% in August 1981 and was kept at high levels until spring 1982, but the inflation rate still averaged more than 12% in 1981-82. Jobs were also lost to mechanization in industry and to workforce downsizing by many Canadian firms in order to stay efficient and complete internationally in the increasingly globalized economy Alberta, the prime location of Canada's oil industry at the time, experienced a boom in the late 1970s, 1980 and early 1981, with rapid employment growth, attaining, at 76%, the highest percentage of persons aged 15–64 being employed (defined as the "employment ratio") of all the provinces in early 1981. By the start of 1982, however, Alberta's oil boom had ended due to over-expansion and the deep global recession of that year, which caused oil prices to plummet, with Alberta then suffering the steepest drop (7.2 percentage points) in its employment ratio of all the provinces by mid-1983. Yukon's mining industry was also particularly hard hit and more than 70,000 of 115,000 miners across the country were out of work by the end of 1982.