Commission on the Reform of Ontario's Public Services

The human cost of this lacklustre performance shows up in the employment picture, where the
old verities of a labour market in which Ontario always outshone the rest of Canada have been
replaced by new patterns:
� Ontario’s unemployment rate, once reliably lower than the national average, has been
above the national rate for over five years now and was generally higher than the jobless
rate in Quebec from the beginning of 2009 through the third quarter of 2011. In 2009 and
2010, the Ontario unemployment rate was 0.7 percentage point higher than the national
rate; the gap narrowed in 2011, when the Ontario rate was 7.8 per cent, while the
Canadian rate was 7.5 per cent.
� The employment rate, perhaps the best measure of the health of the labour market, could
once be counted on to be at least three percentage points higher than the national
average. But since 2008, it has been lower than the national rate. In 2011, 61.6 per cent of
working-age Ontarians had a job, compared with 61.8 per cent nationally. The Ontario rate
is down 2.1 percentage points from the most recent peak in 2003 and 2004. Such a
difference translates into about 229,000 jobs.
� The decline of factory employment — traditionally a source of well-paid jobs — as a share
of total employment accelerated in the past decade. Such jobs have been growing
steadily less important in all developed countries, a consequence of strong productivity
gains relative to other sectors of the economy and of outsourcing manufacturing activity
to lower-wage Asian countries. In 1976, manufacturing accounted for 23.2 per cent of all
Ontario jobs; this fell to 18.2 per cent in 2002 after recovering from an even lower reading
during the recession of the early 1990s. Through the rest of the latest decade, as the
dollar climbed and the auto industry faded, manufacturing’s share of employment has
slid rapidly — to 11.8 per cent in 2010 and 2011.
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