Toronto booms, regions struggle
Outside of the central region, just 1,600 jobs were added last year, David Reevely writes.
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, the Greater Toronto Area 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 (six 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 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 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 — the greater Greater Toronto Area, really.
Premier Kathleen Wynne took grief this week over a tweet from Sudbury News Now, a joke account, which wrote that on a northern swing the premier told students that if they wanted “real success” in life, they ought to move to Toronto.
Wynne didn’t say that but the satirical line took in a spokesman for interim Tory leader Vic Fedeli, leadership candidate Christine Elliott and a former commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police, all of whom were appalled. It would indeed have been a suicidal thing for a politician to say. It also would have been close to the truth.
The FAO’s stats are very similar to ones the Fraser Institute put together in 2016. The conservative think-tank cut up the province’s regions differently and focused on what had happened since the last recession, but reached similar conclusions: Ontario’s urban economies are roaring but smaller centres and remote communities are suffering.
The FAO, needless to say, is not the Fraser Institute. A Liberal government can easily dismiss the Fraser people as axe-grinders — the FAO, not so much.
“The nature of work is changing, and while our economy is growing, not everyone in the province is benefiting from this growth,” Economic Development Minister Steven Del Duca said in response. “As the report highlights, the bulk of new jobs were created in central Ontario and the GTA with there being modest job growth in other regions.
“The report also points out that precarious work remains prevalent and that more needs to be done to improve the gender wage gap.”
Naturally, the things the government has been doing anyway are the right responses: “These findings are exactly why we took historic action to create more opportunity and security for workers with a plan for fairer workplaces and better jobs, a plan to raise the minimum wage, make university and college tuition free for middle and low income students and to provide free prescription drugs for everyone under the age of 25,” Del Duca said.
The Liberals started focusing on this stuff after Donald Trump was elected, hoping to head off some of the hopelessness and economic anger that fuelled his candidacy for president. They want to make some of life’s keepyou-up-at-night expenses easier to cope with even if you can’t count on a steady job. But these measures take on the scariness of unemployment, not the problem of jobs lost to automation, consolidation and offshoring.
The opposition Progressive Conservatives blame Liberal policies. “Whether it’s skyrocketing hydro rates, exorbitant taxes and fees, or a politically motivated overnight hike to the minimum wage, Ontario is no longer open for business under the Wynne Liberals,” their finance critic and NepeanCarleton MPP Lisa MacLeod said. “Job creators are finding it harder to make ends meet and get ahead.”
It’s not as if we have a model to follow. Kansas tried fierce tax cuts and ended up with both a shredded state budget and a weak economy. Republican legislators eventually revolted and overrode their own governor, who quit for a Trump administration post. Wisconsin has been doing the same thing with better results, but not markedly better than those in other states that haven’t cut.
Ontario’s overall record under the activist Liberals is better but with these very big regional disparities that aren’t shrinking. If you live in a city and wonder why some of your fellow Ontarians are so furious with the Liberals, this is it.
While our economy is growing, not everyone in the province is benefiting from this growth.