February 04, 2011
Rob Ferguson
Premier Dalton McGuinty likes to boast that Ontario has now regained 95 per cent of the jobs lost in the recession — but is that claim as good as it sounds?
Not really, say opposition parties and at least one economist.
That’s because thousands and thousands of the 219,500 jobs lost in the recession were manufacturing positions with good pay and many of the new jobs are part-time or lower-paying service sector jobs.
“The premier can trot out whatever rosy numbers he wants but we still haven’t recovered,” New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath said after Statistics Canada released the latest unemployment numbers Friday.
Ontario gained 36,000 jobs in January — including 12,000 in the Toronto region — but the province’s unemployment rate remained stuck at 8.1 per cent because more people came off the sidelines and tried to enter the workforce.
That’s down from a recession peak of 9.3 per cent but well above the 6.5 per cent before the devastating downturn began in October 2008 and ended in July 2009.
“Ontario made good strides in January,” said TD Bank economist Sonya Gulati, who noted Ontario is one of five provinces that still haven’t reached pre-recession employment levels.
She predicts that will happen as early as this month — another 5,000 jobs are needed to close the gap — but said it’s only part of the story.
“When you take a look behind the numbers we do trail in terms of having part-timers and service-sector jobs . . . It could be someone who has been laid off in manufacturing and is working part-time.”
Getting the province to a situation where incomes and jobs are equivalent to pre-recession levels “is certainly going to take a bit of time,” she added.
In Ottawa this weekend for a Liberal party convention, McGuinty said, “We’re not out of the woods yet. There are still far too many people without work, so we still have more to do.”
It’s a message he’s been taking on the road to civic groups like rotary clubs and in a slide show about Ontario’s economy in advance of the Oct. 6 election, pointing out Ontario’s recession job recovery is well ahead of Japan’s, the United Kingdom’s and the United States’.
What he doesn’t tell his audiences is that performance lags other provinces including Manitoba, Quebec and Saskatchewan.
“Ontario is still not recovering at a rate comparable to the rest of the country,” said Progressive Conservative MPP Peter Shurman (Thornhill), his party’s economic development critic.
“It is clear that part-time numbers were what increased significantly while full-time employment grew only minimally . . . what we are seeing here is people taking stopgap measures to stay afloat as Ontario families continue to suffer.”