According to a report by Financial Accountability Ontario saw 210,000 net new jobs created in 2019, the largest level of employment increase ever recorded.
The FAO provides an independent analysis of the provinces finances, and economical trends.
Peter Weltman, the Financial Accountability officer for the province of Ontario, said that reports on the labour market are important because it gives a picture of what is going on in the market, and potentially influence economic policies and decisions.
The FAO report also indicates that the level of unemployment in the province remains the same from 2018 at 5.6 per cent, the lowest since 1989.
Despite the increase of new jobs, there are some challenges facing the Ontario job market. Most of the new jobs are created in city centres.
From 2010 to 2019, 65.9 per cent of new jobs were created in the city of Toronto. The Ottawa-Gatineau region accounting for the second largest amount of new jobs at 8.1 per cent.
Weltman believes that a lot of growth in big city centres is driven by immigration into big cities.
“Historically if you look over the last hundred years there is a migration from smaller centres to larger centres and it’s not just happening here it happens around the world,” he said. “So that is just the reality of the way the labor market is behaving today.”
The number of self-employed workers without any paid workers increased by 80,000 in 2019.
“We’ve seen significant growth in technology and the Internet has made [self] employment much more feasible than it would have been maybe 20 years ago,” Weltman said. “So thinking of people like Uber drivers or know restaurant delivery or even consulting, you can do specific pieces of work for clients all around the world. You can do that from your bedroom if you really want to.”
“Those sorts of things weren’t doable 20 years ago.”
However the FAO said that researchers see self employed work as precarious. Weltman said they’re characterized this way because it lacks the security of continuous employment.
Weltman said that the FAO is being cautious about the report of job growth because participation in the labour force has not been as high as it used to be.
According to FAO’s report this is only the second time in 10 years that the labour force participation has increased. Ontario also has the fifth lowest rate of labour participation among male adults in Canada at 90.6 per cent. The labour force participation rate among adult females in Ontario is the third lowest in Canada at 82.1 per cent.
For reasons beyond our control, and for an undetermined period of time, our comment section is now closed. However, our social networks remain open to your contributions.