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Having lost more than 3,000 jobs in March, the London area’s unemployment rate is now the highest in Canada, according to new numbers released by Statistics Canada.
In the reporting period ending in March, the London area — which includes London, St. Thomas and Strathroy — hit an unemployment rate of 9.1 per cent, putting it at the highest in the country.
The unemployment rate is the number of unemployed people expressed as a percentage of the overall labour force and can be affected by other factors, including the growth in population.
London’s unemployment rate has grown in each of the past eight months as of the end of March, the last reporting period available, when it hit 9.1 per cent. It was 7.1 per cent in November of last year.
Also, the London-area unemployment rate is above the Ontario overage of 7.6 per cent.
Petrusia Hontar is the executive director of the Middlesex-Oxford Workforce Planning Board, which gathers local workforce information.
She said although the numbers can be skewed somewhat by changes in population, it doesn’t point to an encouraging trend for the local economy.
“What this just means is that there has been a little bit of stagnation in growth and the rate of re-hiring,” she said.
Some London employers, including manufacturing companies, have reported job loses over the reporting period.
Hontar said this is a factor, but likely not the only one.
“I think that some of the layoffs we’ve seen in the post-secondary education realm is also quite concerning and that’s going to have some impact,” she said.
The employment rate for the London area, which tracks the number of people working, is also on a downward trend.
It was 332,000 in November of last year and fell to 320,000 in March.
Graham Henderson is the CEO of the London Chamber of Commerce. He said the area’s jobless numbers are concerning, while also pointing out that national job growth numbers are at best flat.
Henderson cited a handful of reasons for the soft job numbers, including the ongoing trade dispute with the United States and some of the challenges facing downtown London.
“What’s a concern for us here in London is that we’re above the national average,” he said. “We shouldn’t be totally surprised because of the region’s reliance on the United States.”
Henderson also pointed that other cities in the region had similar though slightly better jobless numbers for March, including Kitchener (8.6) and Windsor (8.5).
“The region is all high. From that perspective it’s not just a London problem,” he said.
Other factors Henderson cited as keeping job numbers down include moves by Fanshawe College to shed a third of its workforce due to budget pressures and new limits on visas for foreign students.
“That’s had a huge ripple effect,” he said.