TORONTO

Ontario's work force still recovering from recession

ctvtoronto.ca Published Friday, November 5, 2010 4:53PM EDT

A worker inspects vehicles as they roll off the line at the assembly plant in Oakville, Ont. on Monday Oct. 16, 2006. (Aaron Harris / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

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Two years after the province was plunged into recession, Ontario hasn't fully recovered all the jobs it lost.

TD Economics said Friday that the province is still 57,200 jobs below its peak reached in October 2008, when its unemployment rate was 6.6 per cent.

"What we are trying to highlight is that some provinces are already there," Sonya Gulati, an economist with TD Economics, told CTV Toronto. "But others are taking a little bit longer, and that's due to their industrial composition."

Ontario is taking longer because its manufacturing sector got hit hard by the downturn, she said.

In the Statistics Canada labour force survey released Friday, the national agency said manufacturing employment dropped 10.8 per cent from pre-recession levels, particularly in Alberta and Ontario.

Many of those jobs have come back, but growth in the sector has been moderating lately, Gulati said.

With the Canadian dollar flirting with parity with the U.S. dollar, she said the question for export-oriented economies such as Ontario's will be how long the dollar stays at parity.

Ontario's unemployment rate was estimated to be 8.6 per cent in October, a decline of 0.2 percentage points from September, Statistics Canada said.

The national rate was 7.9 per cent, compared to eight per cent in September.

Canada's economy created 3,000 new jobs in October. Economists had expected 15,000 jobs to be created.

Ontario did gain 29,400 full-time jobs, while losing 32,100 part-time positions. That reduced total employment by 2,800 positions -- a decline that the agency doesn't see as statistically significant, said Lahouaria Yssaad, a Statistics Canada economist.

However, because the labour force shrank by 20,000 people, the unemployment rate declined, Statistics Canada said.

Yssaad said the drop was concentrated among men aged 25 and over. "That was a statistically significant decline," she said.

Gulati said nationally, the economy has been switching from part-time jobs to full-time jobs, which provide for better income potential for workers but does nothing to statistically budge the unemployment rate.

Self-employment has also been declining, with private sector employment picking up, she said.

Here are the October unemployment rates for some selected Ontario cities (the September rate is in brackets):