TORONTO, Oct. 14, 2026 /CNW/ -- Employment rates (the share of employed working-age population over age 15) in four of Ontario's five distinct regions are still below pre-COVID 19 levels, with southwestern Ontario's employment rate having increased just 0.6 percentage points above 2019 levels, finds a new study published by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.

"In almost every corner of the province of Ontario, economic pain persists with the employment rate—a key measure of an economy's strength—still not having recovered to pre-pandemic levels," said Jake Fuss, director of Ontario prosperity studies at the Fraser Institute and co-author of The Five Solitudes of Ontario: A Regional Analysis of Labour Market Performance Since 2015.

The five regions of Ontario include Southwestern Ontario, Ottawa and the surrounding area, Eastern Ontario, Northern Ontario, and the Greater Golden Horseshoe.

The study finds that in 2025, regional employment rates in all but southwestern Ontario were still below their pre-COVID (2019) levels. Eastern Ontario was 2.0 percentage points below its 2019 level, both Ottawa and the Greater Golden Horseshoe area were 1.9 percentage points below 2019 levels, and northern Ontario was 0.1 percentage point below 2019 levels. Southwestern Ontario was the only region to experience an increase, at 0.6 percentage points above 2019 levels.

The employment rate is an important measure of an economy's strength because it measures the percentage of working-aged people engaged in work. The employment rate in 2025 ranged in Ontario from 51.6 per cent in Eastern Ontario to 61.9 per cent in Ottawa and the surrounding area.

For the province as a whole, the employment rate declined from 61.6 per cent in 2019 to 60.0 per cent in 2025.

"Ontario is an enormous jurisdiction and given the economic and demographic dominance of the Greater Golden Horseshoe area, provincial-level statistics often mask what's really going on in each of Ontario's distinct regions," Fuss said.

"Regional-level analysis shows that economic pain persists in almost every corner of the province that are still lagging their own pre-pandemic levels when it comes to the employment rate."

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The Fraser Institute is an independent Canadian public policy research and educational organization with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Halifax, and Montreal, and ties to a global network of think-tanks in 87 countries. Its mission is to improve the quality of life for Canadians, their families and future generations by studying, measuring and broadly communicating the effects of government policies, entrepreneurship and choice on their well-being. To protect the Institute's independence, it does not accept grants from governments or contracts for research. Visit www.fraserinstitute.org

SOURCE The Fraser Institute