Ontario’s economy is ticking over nicely, the province’s financial accountability office says, but most of the benefits are going to Toronto.
Last year, Greater Toronto added 69,700 jobs and central Ontario (which includes the tech powerhouse of Waterloo) added 57,200, according to the independent budget watchdog at Queen’s Park.
But everywhere else — eastern, northern and southwestern Ontario, combined — added just 1,600 jobs.
This is a bad, bad, bad bit of news in a report released Wednesday that’s overall pretty upbeat. “Ontario Records Strong Labour Market Performance in 2017” is the headline; the province saw the most jobs created in any year since 2003 and its lowest unemployment rate (6 per cent) since 2000.
Long-term unemployment is down. The number of people with precarious jobs is stable. The wage gap between men and women is, too — not improving, but not getting worse. Fewer young people are working, continuing a 25-year trend, but more of them are in school.
Zoom in, though, and it’s clear that you’d much rather be looking for work in Toronto than anywhere else.
Between 2007 and 2017, southwestern Ontario lost 21,900 jobs, according to Statistics Canada data the FAO crunched. Northern Ontario lost 20,800.
Ten years of population growth, trade, economic-development work by all governments, and now fewer people are employed in those big swaths of the province.
Eastern Ontario has gained 30,500 jobs in 10 years, though employment in this end of the province actually peaked in 2012 and has been stagnant since.
Greater Toronto, meanwhile, has added jobs every year since the recession, usually tens of thousands of them, for a total of 465,500 over 10 years. Central Ontario has added 129,300. That’s a big crescent of
the farthest reaches of the GO transit network, from Niagara to Kitchener to Barrie to the Kawarthas. Greater Greater Toronto, really.