There is going to be a conference on economic development ithis week. The Impact of Development workshop will be held this Thursday and Friday at Trinity United Hall, 310 Park Street Thunder Bay and has been made possible through the support of the Resources, Economy, and Society Research Group (RESRG) at Lakehead University, ReSDA: Resources and Sustainable Development in the Arctic, Lakehead University Department of History, Canadian International Council – Thunder Bay Branch, and Lakehead University Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities.
The focus of the conference is single industry communities and features presentations on northern Ontario, Atlantic Canada as well as the Arctic and even Latin America. Among the resource sectors covered are forestry and mining. Moreover, a glance at the program will illustrate that there will be a diverse set of perspectives available with respect to development. I will be doing an overview on the resource sector experience in northwestern Ontario with a foray into mining and the Ring of Fire on the Friday afternoon. See the program below.
Day 1
Day 2: Morning
Day 2: Afternoon
Everyone is welcome!
Northern Economist 2.0
Tuesday 27 February 2018
Thursday 15 February 2018
Recent Labour Force Numbers for Northern Ontario Are Not Pretty
Last week’s labour force numbers for Canada
from Statistics
Canada were seen as a bit of a shock given that employment
fell by 88,000 in January. Part-time employment declined (-137,000), while full-time employment was up (+49,000). At
the same time, the unemployment rate increased by 0.1 percentage
points to 5.9%. Ontario also
declined by about 51,000 jobs and much of the loss was due to part-time work. So how does northern Ontario compare when
recent labour force estimates are looked at?
The accompanying figure looks at
employment growth for northeast and northwest Ontario compared to Ontario and
Canada between December 2017 and January 2018.
Whereas Ontario and Canada saw employment drop by just over one half of
one percent, total employment in the northeast declined 2.4 percent while in
the northwest it fell by 1.8 percent. As
well, the losses were more driven by full-time employment as it dropped 2.5 percent
in the northeast and 2.3 percent in the northwest. All one can hope is that the January numbers
are a short-term aberration because northern Ontario saw its employment drop
more than either Ontario or Canada and the northeast seems to have been hit harder.
Population Growth Results: Thunder Bay and Sudbury at the Bottom
Statistics Canada has released its recent sub-provincial population estimates for 2016/17 and the results find that
population is still growing faster in the Prairies
well as parts of Ontario but the two major northern
Ontario CMAs are not in the pack.
According the Statistics Canada, the 10 CMAs with the highest population
growth in 2016/2017 were in either the Prairies or Ontario. In 2016/2017, the
population growth rate was 2.0% or higher in four CMAs: Saskatoon (+2.8%),
Regina (+2.4%), Guelph (+2.2%) and Ottawa–Gatineau (Ontario part) (+2.2 and were
followed by Toronto (+1.9%), Oshawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary (+1.8%
each), and Kitchener–Cambridge–Waterloo (+1.7%). The figure below shows the picture pretty clearly.
At the bottom of the rankings are Sudbury,
Thunder Bay and Saguenay. Sudbury is
third from the bottom with a population increase of only 0.1 percent. The population decreased in the Saguenay
(-0.2%) and Thunder Bay (-0.1%) CMAs for the fourth consecutive year with
Saguenay’s population decrease partly attributable to out-migration of young
adults aged 18 to live elsewhere in Quebec. In Thunder Bay, the number of
deaths surpassed the number of births, and has done so since 2006/2007,
contributing to its population decline.
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