When looking at trends in the northern Ontario economy, we often look at evidence on population growth, unemployment rates, personal incomes or employment creation. Well, here is another indicator courtesy of Statistics Canada Table 11-001 - Summary of charitable donors, annual. Now this data is on charitable contributions and provides information on the value of donations (more on that in a later post) but it also provides data on the number of taxfilers by jurisdiction.
Why is the number of taxfilers an interesting number? If your economy is growing and there is substantial economic activity, more people are either working or setting up businesses and income is being generated and by extension the number of income tax taxfilers should be going up. So what do the numbers look like?
Figure 1 presents the number of income tax taxfilers for Thunder Bay and Sudbury from 1997 to 2015 and for Sault Ste. Marie, North Bay and Timmins for the period 2008 to 2015 (which is what is available), Needless to say, things look a little flat in these northern Ontario cities especially compared to Ontario as a whole in Figure 2 which has seen steady growth in the number of taxfilers despite having a fairly moribund economy until just a couple of years ago.
Figure 3 provides the percent change for these northern Ontario cities and Ontario as a whole for the period of commonly available numbers spanning the years 2008 to 2015. The number of taxfilers has shrunk in four out of the five cities - only Thunder Bay has managed a slight increase. North Bay shrank by -0.3 percent and Sudbury by -0.5 percent which is rather modest compared to Timmins and the Sault. The number of taxfilers in Timmins shrank by 3.1 percent and the Sault by 2.6 percent. Thunder Bay, on the other hand registered a very miniscule increase of one tenth of one percent. Ontario as a whole saw an increase of 9.2 percent in the number of taxfilers between 2008 and 2015.
So - more evidence of the blatantly obvious I suppose. Growth in northern Ontario's economy has essentially come to a halt. Given the coming provincial election, it will be entertaining to say the least to watch how the three party leaders handle the issue.
