Greater Sudbury is lagging behind other municipalities when it comes to employment recovery post-COVID, with employed Greater Sudburians down 4.8 per cent from January 2020.
This ranks the city 32 of 35 municipalities in the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s Business Data Lab’s listings, which the organization’s chief economist shared during a presentation in Copper Cliff on Thursday.
Invited by the Greater Sudbury Chamber of Commerce, Stephen Tapp noted that the slow employment recovery has been accompanied by a “tight labour market” in the region.
At the same time, the city’s unemployment rate has also been historically low (4.6 per cent in November) and the city’s population grew by 2.8 per cent between 2016 and 2021.
These statistics draw from an “accumulation of factors,” local Chamber president Anthony Davis told Sudbury.com following Thursday’s 2023 Development Outlook presentation at Bryston’s on the Park.
There’s an aging demographic, people relocating to Greater Sudbury are not necessarily of a working age and there’s a limited number of people qualified to work in skilled labour. Schools aren’t doing a good enough job of promoting skilled trades, Davis added.
During his presentation, Tapp also pointed to the limited number of immigrants working in the Greater Sudbury area as affecting the local economy. While immigrants make up approximately 25.8 per cent of the national labour force, less than six per cent of people employed in Greater Sudbury were born outside of Canada.
“If you want the labour force to increase, that’s certainly going to be an area of growth moving forward,” he said.
Another statistic that stuck out in Tapp’s presentation related to the number of people returning to in-person work. In the Greater Sudbury area, mobility to workplaces is still down seven per cent from pre-pandemic levels, while in the city’s downtown core it’s down 32.7 per cent.
When it comes to returning to in-person work downtown, Greater Sudbury ranks 42 of 55 cities listed and considered “not recovered.”
Rather than dissuade employers from accommodating remote work, Davis said there’s an opportunity to fill vacated space with other things, such as housing to help fill the city’s strong demand for housing.
Although he said most employers would ideally want people working in-person, the current job market is such that employees can shop around for employers willing to make that accommodation.
“The power has shifted from businesses down to workers in this labour market,” Tapp said, noting, “Labour is scarce.”
It wasn’t all negative news on Thursday, with Tapp noting that Sudbury business recovery (the number of businesses operating) is only slightly behind national trends. It hovers around meeting pre-pandemic levels, while a two per cent increase in active businesses has been seen nationally. Local pandemic spending has increased by 65 per cent relative to pre-pandemic levels, against a national average of 55 per cent.
In all, Tapp summarized that although there’s been a slow recovery in workplace mobility and employment, there has been a full recovery in business counts, accompanied by tight labour markets and strong local spending.
To Greater Sudbury’s benefit is a bright future in critical minerals, he said, noting, “There’s a lot of excitement about what could happen in the future.”
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.
