Like just about everywhere else in the world, Ontario was hit hard by the job losses that resulted from the assorted lock-downs and coronavirus containment strategies of the COVID-19 pandemic. Figure 1 presents seasonally adjusted monthly employment data from Statistics Canada for Ontario from 2006 to the present. From February 2020 to June 2020, Ontario lost 990,000 jobs or 13.2 percent of its employment. These losses, however, were not uniform in size across the major urban centers of the province.
Figure 2 plots the ranked employment losses from the start of the pandemic in February when the monthly employment losses began to June 2020 when the rebound begins and going from worst to best performers. Hardest hit with a 25 percent drop in employment was Belleville, followed by Windsor at 18 percent and then Thunder Bay at 16 percent. The three lightest hit cities were Ottawa with a 10 percent drop, Brantford at 7 percent and Guelph at just below 7 percent.
With the exception of Barrie, all of these cities have managed to bounce back since June as Figure 3 illustrates. The largest rebound as was the largest drop happened in Belleville. Belleville saw employment rise 25 percent and was followed by London at 16 percent and Kingston at 15 percent. The smallest rebounds aside from Barrie which appears to have continued to shrink were Guelph at 6 percent, Sudbury at 5 percent and St. Catharines-Niagara at 4.5 percent.
Despite the rebound, only two of these urban areas have managed to recover enough employment to be at more employment than the start of the pandemic drop in February – Kingston and London – though not by much. Others still have a gap and it varies substantially. Ontario as a whole is currently at about 96 percent of its February 2020 level of employment. Figure 4 ranks the cities by their employment in February 2021 as a percentage share of their February 2020 employment. Thunder Bay, Windsor, Sudbury, St. Catharines-Niagara and Barrie have recovered the least. Thunder Bay is only at 93 percent of its pre pandemic level of employment followed by Windsor at 92 percent, Sudbury at 91 percent, St. Catharines at 88 percent and Barrie at 84 percent. On the other hand, after Kingston and London, Brantford and Guelph are at just over 99 percent of pre-pandemic employment.
Overall, Ontario has seen a remarkable 12 months with massive employment losses and a rather large rebound, but which only puts it back at about 2018 levels in terms of employment. There is still a lot of recovery to go.