What's really going on in the job market in Ontario

The vast majority of workers in Ontario haven't experienced anything quite like it their entire working lives: a labour market tilted in their favour. 

Statistics show unemployment running as low as it's ever been, record-high job vacancy numbers and unprecedented labour force participation rates.

The labour market is "the tightest it's been in half a century, and it's not unique to Ontario," says economist Armine Yalnizyan. "It's happening all through the global north, wherever there was a baby boom after the Second World War." 

"There's a traffic jam of employers looking to hire," says Brendon Bernard, senior economist at Indeed, a job-search website. 

This profound shift in the job market has implications for just about everybody, whether you're an ordinary worker, an employer, a political leader, or someone waiting to get care in a hospital or service in a restaurant. 

It could bring about significant changes in the world of work — from recruitment tactics to workplace culture to salaries — but that largely depends on how governments and employers respond. 

Premier Doug Ford spoke of "endless employment opportunities" in Ontario during a news conference in Brampton last month.

"You could walk down every street in this province and find a job in every single sector. We need 380,000 people to fill the existing jobs that we have right now," Ford said.

The most recent figures from Statistics Canada show 372,000 job vacancies in Ontario during the third quarter of 2022. That's nearly double the average number of vacancies (195,000) reported during the three years leading up to 2020.

But how good are these jobs? For a fuller picture of what's really going on in the labour market, take a deeper look into what Statistics Canada found about the current vacancies: 

Still, the overall dynamics of the job market in the province differ substantially from how things were before the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Politicians and business leaders sometimes describe what's happening as a worker shortage, but that framing doesn't sit well with some observers. 

"I'm not sure that it's so much a shortage of workers as a shortage of employers that are willing to pay the wages necessary to get people to work for them," said Don Wright, former head of the public service in British Columbia, now a fellow with the Public Policy Forum think tank. 

Bernard also pushes back against the use of the term "worker shortage," saying it has negative connotations and lacks precision.