The recession from which Ontario appears to be emerging had an asymmetrical effect on jobs in the province.

If you made your living in the service sector, you were probably okay. However, if you worked in the goods-producing sector, you and your co-workers may well have gotten hammered -- although there is some emerging good news.

"Almost all the job loss was in construction and manufacturing," TD Economics economist Pascal Gauthier told ctvtoronto.ca.

When one looks around the province, it is cities dominated by resources and manufacturing -- such as Windsor, St. Catharines and Thunder Bay -- where the brunt of the job-loss burden has been borne.

While Toronto's unemployment rate rose, that was due more to labour force growth than job loss, Gauthier said.

The peak employment month was October 2008, and as of this past November, the province is still 179,000 jobs in the hole -- although we're down 193,000 employees, Danielle Zeitsma, a senior economist with Statistics Canada, told ctvtoronto.ca.

The agency differentiates between employees and the self-employed.

Of the employees, 35,000 public sector jobs were lost compared to 158,000 private-sector positions. Self-employment went up 14,000.

Manufacturing sector jobs counted for 117,000 lost jobs or about one in eight such jobs. Construction, the next biggest component of the goods-producing sector, lost 29,000 jobs or about one in 16.

The overall goods sector contracted by 10.5 per cent in the 13-month period.

The service sector only contracted by 0.4 per cent or by 19,000 jobs. Some sectors have actually gained in that period. For example, the finance, insurance, real-estate and leasing category is up 59,000 over the period. Professional, scientific and technical services are up 22,000, or 4.3 per cent.

The most hard-hit service sector is business, building and other support services such as janitorial and landscaping. That dropped 29,000 jobs over the 13 months, a decline of 4.3 per cent, Zeitsma said.

The big picture is that employment is down 2.7 per cent from the recession's peak and down 1.9 per cent from November 2008 to November 2009, she said.

For this past November, the province actually gained 41,000 staff positions and lost 14,000 self-employed ones.

But of those 41,000 jobs, only 9,000 were in the private sector -- a number further weakened by the loss of 4,000 jobs in the goods-producing sectors. The other 32,000 were in the public sector, the majority in education.

Despite the jump in employment, Ontario's unemployment rate remained at 9.3 per cent, the highest outside Atlantic Canada. The national unemployment rate was 8.5 per cent.

In October 2008, Ontario's unemployment rate was 6.5 per cent. Nationally, the rate was 6.2 per cent that month.

Is the worst over?

But TD Economics projects that better times are ahead.

In an early November report, TD economists predicted growth of 2.7 per cent in 2010 and 3.1 per cent in 2011 following an estimated contraction of 3.3 per cent.

"For the fourth quarter, we're almost ensured we're going to get growth, and pretty solid growth at that -- probably three, 3.5 per cent or so," Gauthier said.

"And Ontario is seeing more of a rebound than Canada overall because a lot of that is in manufacturing."

Here's two key bits of news from the battered auto sector:

  • Toyota Canada said it would add a second shift in March at its Woodstock plant to make the RAV4 sport utility vehicle, creating 800 jobs
  • GM said it would recall 600 workers to build the Buick Regal in Oshawa

However, keep in mind between October 2008 and October 2009, the auto sector saw 25,000 jobs disappear, a decline of 17 per cent. There were 125,000 people employed in the auto manufacturing sector in November 2009. Zeitsma said the peak year, going back to 1987, occurred in 2003 when the average annual employment was 209,000.

Premier Dalton McGuinty has said in the past that many of those jobs are never coming back. His green energy strategy announced last February was designed to replace some of the lost manufacturing work.

In the building sector, low interest rates have worked their magic. Housing sales in the GTA have been torrid this fall, something Gauthier doesn't think is sustainable because much of it was driven by pent-up demand. But that growth has helped construction employment.

"When you have a significant low, it's easy to get a bounce-back from those depressed levels," explained Gauthier, adding some of that will moderate.

If construction and manufacturing stabilize and service-sector jobs grow, the overall employment picture should start strengthening, he said.

With the U.S. the destination for more than 80 per cent of Ontario's exports, the economic health of our giant neighbour will influence the pace of recovery, particularly in the goods sector.

In early December, U.S. Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke predicted modest growth with continued high unemployment of between 9.3 and 9.7 per cent.

"Demand in the U.S. is picking up," Gauthier said. "Overall, the fact that the U.S. and the world economy is recovering is nothing but good news for Ontario."

And once the economy stops bottoming out, Ontario's Liberal government can start thinking about how to dig itself out of its nearly $25-billion deficit hole.