Ontario lost almost 11,000 jobs in March, less than the hammering the province's economy has taken in some of the months since the recession started, but an economist says that is cold comfort.

"When that 11,000 looks good, you know how deep it is," Grant Bishop of TD Economics told ctvtoronto.ca on Thursday, referring to the province's economic troubles.

That number masks the fact that 40,000 full-time jobs disappeared and were replaced with about 29,000 part-time "survival jobs," he said.

Ontario's unemployment rate remains at 8.7 per cent, according to Statistics Canada's labour market survey for March. The federal agency said last month that February's rate of 8.7 per cent represented a 12-year high for the province.

Here are the total Ontario job losses since October:

  • March - 11,000 lost
  • February - 35,000 lost
  • January - 71,000 lost
  • December - 2,000 gained
  • November - 56,000 lost
  • October - 11,000 lost

A total of 171,000 jobs were lost from October to March on a seasonally adjusted basis.

"All sectors important to Ontario's economy are showing weakness," Bishop said.

Nationally, the unemployment rate rose to eight per cent in March, a seven-year high. The national economy lost 61,300 jobs last month.

In addition, Ontario revealed that its economy shrank by 1.4 per cent in the final three months of 2008. Consumer spending fell by 1.0 per cent, the first such decline in five years, while the personal savings rate rose to 3.6 per cent.

Finance Minister Dwight Duncan said while the losses in March have been less than in previous months. However, he said the growing unemployment was a concern.

"We've had an awful year in terms of job losses in this province and across the country," he said. "I'm sad that we're seeing it across Canada."

Interim Progressive Conservative Leader Robert Runciman blamed the Liberal government of Premier Dalton McGuinty for the province's economic troubles.

"The McGuinty government has a significant degree of responsibility for the state of the Ontario economy and the fact we're pulling down the rest of the country," he said. "They're going to have a very difficult time convincing Ontarians to re-elect them in 2011."

Duncan tabled a big-spending budget on March 26 that runs a huge deficit and provides stimulus spending.

"There's no easy way out of this," he said. "The infrastructure portion of my budget -- $32.5 billion over two years -- is designed to help with that."

But Bishop noted that many skills aren't transferable across industries, so construction projects  to build necessary future infrastructure might not directly provide a job for a laid-off auto worker in Windsor.

That city in far southwest Ontario has been the hardest-hit major community in Canada. Its March unemployment rate stood at 13.7 per cent. Mayor Eddie Francis predicts it will go higher.

"That number just reflects how hard-working people in the city of Windsor and the region, our families, our friends, our neighbours, are being affected by this downturn in the economy," he said. "It'll be a while before the economy is working again and people are being put back to work."

Here are the unemployment rates for other selected Ontario cities (February's number in brackets):

  • Toronto - 8.8 per cent (8.3)
  • Hamilton - 8.8 (8.4)
  • Kitchener - 9.6 (9.1)
  • London - 8.9 (8.4)
  • Ottawa - 4.9 (4.6)
  • Oshawa - 8.3 (8.2)
  • St. Catharines-Niagara - 9.6 (9.5)

More than 80 per cent of Ontario's exports go to the United States, and weak demand there pushed Ontario's export totals down six per cent in the final quarter of 2008.

However, the province's trade balance improved to a surplus of $3.8 billion due to a 8.3 per cent drop in imports.

Bishop said Ontario's economic recovery, especially in its export-oriented sectors, depends on recovery in the United States. TD Economics doesn't expect things to start picking up there until at least early 2010, he said.

The Ontario budget assumes the worst of the recession will be over by the end of the second quarter of 2009, but Bishop said TD Economics is skeptical about that assumption.

With files from The Canadian Press