The Southwestern Ontario Problem: Too many adults without jobs and not in school.
I was quoted this week in a piece in the London Free Press on why so many Londoners are not working or in school. I thought it would be helpful to do a deeper dive into the data.
One of my frustrations around using the “employment rate” (% of people in a population with a job) as a barometer of the health of a local labour market is that communities like London that have high number of graduate students will have artificially low, as they’re usually counted as not being employed.
One way to correct for this is to instead look at the percentage of adults who neither have a job nor are in school. Unfortunately, this data isn’t available online, but I was able to calculate it from the Labour Force Survey, using the Real Time Remote Access (RTRA) system.
Here’s the data for 25–54 year olds (“prime-aged workers”) in 65 different CMA/CAs in Canada. Recall that CMA/CAs are regional areas, so Toronto CMA includes Mississauga, Brampton, Markham, London CMA includes St. Thomas, etc.
Here’s the data, with commentary to follow.
Percentage of 25–54 Years Olds Not Employed or in School. Sorted by Highest % in 2018

Thoughts:
- This data is from the Labour Force Survey, which is a survey with a pretty small sample size. Because of that, there’s a lot of noise in the data, particularly for smaller communities like Leamington. You’ll tend to see a lot of volatility in the data for those communities; that’s probably due to data issues rather than something actually happening in the community.
- None of this tells you about the quality of jobs (high pay, low pay, full-time, part-time) or the quality of education, for that matter. All it tells us is what percentage of adults currently have neither.
- It’s not a coincidence that the top of the list is dominated by communities in Southwestern Ontario all proximate to each other: Windsor, Chatham-Kent, London, Sarnia-Clearwater, Norfolk, Brantford, St. Catharines-Niagara. What’s happening to these communities is part of a larger phenomenon, it’s not a “made-in-London” or “made-in-Sarnia” problem.
- The top of the list is also heavy with communities in Atlantic Canada (poor Cape Breton!), though others like Halifax are doing quite well.
- Whatever weakness there is in Alberta/Saskatchewan labour markets, it’s mostly not showing up in the 2018 data. We’ll have to see if it does in the 2019. Where it does show up for Alberta and Saskatchewan is in communities that don’t get much press in central Canada, like Prince Albert.
- Quebec does really well on this metric due to one-simple trick: Childcare. Female labour market participation rates are far higher in Quebec than the rest of the country, and it’s paying dividends for the province.
- Toronto CMA does surprisingly poorly on this metric. I suspect that’s the flipside of Quebec: their poor numbers are, in part, due to a lack of affordable childcare.
In Summary
- Canada needs better labour market data. Statistics Canada needs to increase the sample size of the Labour Force Survey, and we need monthly reports, at a CMA level, on the percentage of adults not in employment or education, so we have a better sense of what’s going on at a local level.
- While Alberta and Saskatchewan get all the press (and do have real issues that need to be addressed), Canada has a Southwestern Ontario problem that it is ignoring. Both the federal and provincial government need to step up their game and address the economic weakness in the region.
- “What’s wrong with London” is the wrong question, as it ignores that London’s neighbours are all experiencing similar trends (unless you drive up the 401 and get close enough to Toronto).
- BETTER CHILDCARE NOW.
