Northern Ontario's employment rate has held relatively steady over the last five years with gains in the northwest.
According to figures from Statistics Canada, northwestern Ontario has seen a 1.2 per cent gain in the employment rate this past year with 6.4 per cent unemployment rate compared to 7.6 per cent this time last year.
The figures are reflective of the communities west of Sault Ste, Marie to the Manitoba border.
In the northeast, which includes Timmins, North Bay, Greater Sudbury, and Sault Ste. Marie unemployment held steady over the year with a 0.1 per cent change from 5.5 unemployment in 2007 to 5.6 in 2008.
September and October of this year has seen a 0.2 per cent change in Greater Sudbury with 5.6 per cent unemployment rate in September moving to 5.8 per cent in October.
Thunder Bay's unemployment went from 5.3 per cent to 5.4 per cent in September and October respectively.
The overall employment was unchanged in Ontario in October. So far, it is up 1.5 per cent or 101,000, slightly ahead of the national growth rate of 1.2 per cent.
Gains over the first 10 months of this year were in transportation, warehousing, construction and public administration.
Manufacturing is down 14,000 so far in 2008 compared with a decline of 43,000 over the same period of 2007.
The unemployment rate edged up to 6.5 per cent in October, little change from the beginning of 2008.
Just this past summer, thousands of Canadians, most of them in Ontario, lost their full time jobs or were forced into part time positions as the economy, even back then, was starting to show signs of retreating according to Stats Can reports.
In Ontario 45,500 jobs had disappeared. Those numbers where offset by part time positions but the national employment rate went up to 6.2 per cent, the highest it's been since January 2007.
Reality may be catching up, said Douglas Porter deputy chief economist at BMO Capital Markets in a iStockAnalyst interview.
Canadian employment among immigrants, age 25 to 54, increased last year by 2.1 per cent with Quebec attracting most of the gains. Even still, the employment rate gap between immigrants and the Canadian born has widened.
Population of immigrants increased much faster than their employment with a 0.2 percentage point increase to 77.9 per cent compared to the Canadian born rate that rose by 0.7 percentage points to 83.8 per cent.
The latest figures show that working age immigrants rose by 52,000 or 2.1 per cent from 2006. This is stronger than the 1.3 per cent growth among the Canadians born in the same age group.
Last year over one-half of growth in employment among core working age immigrants occurred in Quebec (28,000).
