When did it become apparent that Toronto would surpass Montreal...

[Docere]

It is funny how Ontario's very prosperity for most of the 20th century owes to its links to the US Great Lakes manufacturing belt, but now Torontonians act as though they never had anything to do with this region across the border (though to be fair Toronto and Ontario has diverged significantly from the US Great Lakes region over the past 50 years).

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by Docere

It is funny how Ontario's very prosperity for most of the 20th century owes to its links to the US Great Lakes manufacturing belt, but now Torontonians act as though they never had anything to do with this region across the border (though to be fair Toronto and Ontario has diverged significantly from the US Great Lakes region over the past 50 years).

I don't think this is true. Most Torontonians who are in a position to move levers on economic development are fully aware that exports of manufactured goods to the US, particularly auto parts and assembled vehicles, are a huge part of our economy, and they ask the Feds and the province to adjust things accordingly.

The proof is in the pudding: the Gordie Howe bridge, the new intermodal terminals for CN and CP, all the investments the province makes in widening the 401 southtwesterly towards Windsor, not to mention the huge investments in battery plants and transmission infrastructure.

Yes, there have been job losses in manufacturing in the Toronto CMA and a growth in FIRE jobs, but if someone went on stage at a Board of Trade or Conference Board of Canada summit and said that the GTA should abandon manufacturing and logistics and put all of its eggs in the financial services basket, they'd probably get booed off the stage.

[Docere]

Right, the people who run things obviously understand the foundations of the Toronto/Ontario economy. And it's not all about FIRE or "creative cities" (even though the guru of the latter lives in Toronto now).

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Docere

Right, the people who run things obviously understand the foundations of the Toronto/Ontario economy. And it's not all about FIRE or "creative cities" (even though the guru of the latter lives in Toronto now).

A lot of the creative class type stuff looks at percentages of the economy but I always wonder what would happen if different parts of the economy were removed.

Agriculture's share of total inputs has fallen but almost all of humanity would die without it. I think the impact of cutting out, say, direct-to-consumer internet startups would probably be pretty minor. And I'm skeptical of how well capital is allocated overall, particularly here in Canada. I'm pretty sure I saw a stat the other day showing that more money gets spent on home renos than home construction. I wonder how much of that is people using HELOCs to replace "dated" kitchen cabinets while others are packing into ramshackle apartments.

[Docere]

Manufacturing employment:

Los Angeles 476,000 6.9%
Chicago 406,000 8.2%
New York 353,000 3.4%
Toronto (GTHA) 321,000 8.1%
Detroit 237,000 10.9%
Montreal 208,000 9%

https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/sho...d.php?t=257031

Interesting how the GTHA is pretty close to the much larger NYC metro area in terms of the numbers employed in manufacturing (and share in Chicago is basically identical).

[Docere]

For interest, here's employment in financial services (ca. 2018 from a presentation to the Conference Board). Toronto is #2 in North America and #7 in the world.

Tokyo 650,000
Beijing 545,000
New York 452,000
London 353,000
Shanghai 342,000
Paris 314,000
Toronto 277,000
Hong Kong 263,000
Chicago 208,000
Singapore 196,000
Sydney 175,000
Frankfurt 137,000
Los Angeles 137,000
Boston 123,000
Montreal 115,000
Washington 80,000
Vancouver 65,000
San Francisco 59,000
Luxemburg 30,000
Calgary 26,000

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by Docere

Manufacturing employment:

Los Angeles 476,000 6.9%
Chicago 406,000 8.2%
New York 353,000 3.4%
Toronto (GTHA) 321,000 8.1%
Detroit 237,000 10.9%
Montreal 208,000 9%

https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/sho...d.php?t=257031

Interesting how the GTHA is pretty close to the much larger NYC metro area in terms of the numbers employed in manufacturing (and share in Chicago is basically identical).

On this forum, and in the economic development lobbying community, people beat Toronto and Canadian cities over the head for having bad infrastructure for goods movement/logistics but, honestly, at least by North American standards, Toronto is built reasonably well to move trucks and especially freight trains around.

New York is uniquely awful for logistics and, by extension, for manufacturing. If you want to drive a truck across the NYC metro, you have to rely on a handful of expensive toll bridges and you have to drive on one of the traffic-choked Robert Moses-era highways. I don't think there's a major freight rail line through NYC; they mostly just terminate on the New Jersey side with all last mile deliveries to the city and Long Island being done by truck, again on those old freeways and toll bridges. The airports seem bad for air freight too - congested and far away from logistics facilities.

Did any city deindustrialize as completely as New York? Maybe as a percentage there are starker examples, but in absolute numbers, New York has to be up there in total jobs lost between, say, 1950-present.

[kool maudit]

I would have thought Los Angeles would be a bit higher. Curious about Philadelphia.

[big T]

Originally Posted by Docere

For interest, here's employment in financial services (ca. 2018 from a presentation to the Conference Board). Toronto is #2 in North America and #7 in the world.

Tokyo 650,000
Beijing 545,000
New York 452,000
London 353,000
Shanghai 342,000
Paris 314,000
Toronto 277,000
Hong Kong 263,000
Chicago 208,000
Singapore 196,000
Sydney 175,000
Frankfurt 137,000
Los Angeles 137,000
Boston 123,000
Montreal 115,000
Washington 80,000
Vancouver 65,000
San Francisco 59,000
Luxemburg 30,000
Calgary 26,000

Interesting. If you have a link, I'd be curious to see the methodology, which I think may be somewhat misleading here.

As an example, being familiar with the Montreal market, this looks to me like they're simply adding up headcount from financial industry employers (banks, fund managers mostly). So a Desjardins would contribute something like 20-30k to this total, even though a vast majority of those would be support employees (IT mainly).
Whereas markets like NYC have very little backoffice on-site, and tend to offshore/nearshore a lot more. So a much higher proportion of NYC's 450k are core finance roles, compared to Montreal's for instance.

That's cool if you want to measure "headcount in companies operating mainly in finance and banking", not so great if you're looking for "number of financial services professionals". There are a lot more than twice as many of those in HK than in Mtl, for starters.

[Luisito]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

I would have thought Los Angeles would be a bit higher. Curious about Philadelphia.

it would have been in the past. Much higher.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

On this forum, and in the economic development lobbying community, people beat Toronto and Canadian cities over the head for having bad infrastructure for goods movement/logistics but, honestly, at least by North American standards, Toronto is built reasonably well to move trucks and especially freight trains around.

New York is uniquely awful for logistics and, by extension, for manufacturing. If you want to drive a truck across the NYC metro, you have to rely on a handful of expensive toll bridges and you have to drive on one of the traffic-choked Robert Moses-era highways. I don't think there's a major freight rail line through NYC; they mostly just terminate on the New Jersey side with all last mile deliveries to the city and Long Island being done by truck, again on those old freeways and toll bridges. The airports seem bad for air freight too - congested and far away from logistics facilities.

Did any city deindustrialize as completely as New York? Maybe as a percentage there are starker examples, but in absolute numbers, New York has to be up there in total jobs lost between, say, 1950-present.

"New York had been a major manufacturing center since the earliest days of the republic. In 1950, 28 percent of the city's employed workers were in manufacturing, two points above the national figure...seven of the nation's ten largest cities had a higher percentage of their workforces engaged in manufacturing than New York did. Nonetheless, New York had a goods-producing economy unprecedented in size, output and complexity. In 1947, New York had more manufacturing jobs than Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles and Boston put together."

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nyti...kers&st=Search

- Joshua Freeman, Working Class New York

[Docere]

I haven't found much on London but I recall reading somewhere manufacturing employment was around 2 or 3%.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by big T

Interesting. If you have a link, I'd be curious to see the methodology, which I think may be somewhat misleading here.

As an example, being familiar with the Montreal market, this looks to me like they're simply adding up headcount from financial industry employers (banks, fund managers mostly). So a Desjardins would contribute something like 20-30k to this total, even though a vast majority of those would be support employees (IT mainly).
Whereas markets like NYC have very little backoffice on-site, and tend to offshore/nearshore a lot more. So a much higher proportion of NYC's 450k are core finance roles, compared to Montreal's for instance.

That's cool if you want to measure "headcount in companies operating mainly in finance and banking", not so great if you're looking for "number of financial services professionals". There are a lot more than twice as many of those in HK than in Mtl, for starters.

That's exactly what it is. 277,000 represents around 8% of the workforce in Toronto, so it's not just financial services professionals.

https://www.conferenceboard.ca/in-fa...ancial-sector/

[Docere]

New York has twice as many working in financial activities (809,000) than in manufacturing (350,000)

https://www.bls.gov/regions/northeas...nt_newyork.htm

[Loco101]

Originally Posted by Docere

It is funny how Ontario's very prosperity for most of the 20th century owes to its links to the US Great Lakes manufacturing belt, but now Torontonians act as though they never had anything to do with this region across the border (though to be fair Toronto and Ontario has diverged significantly from the US Great Lakes region over the past 50 years).

A lot of Toronto's prosperity is from mining and especially in Northern Ontario. Look at the top stocks even today on the TSE and so many of them are mining.

I've never heard Torontonians or anybody in Southern Ontario say that the nearby market across the border wasn't important. I think that because Toronto is now the most successful major city in the Great Lakes region that there isn't the same level of reliance of Great Lakes state markets that there used to be.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Loco101

A lot of Toronto's prosperity is from mining and especially in Northern Ontario. Look at the top stocks even today on the TSE and so many of them are mining.

I've never heard Torontonians or anybody in Southern Ontario say that the nearby market across the border wasn't important. I think that because Toronto is now the most successful major city in the Great Lakes region that there isn't the same level of reliance of Great Lakes state markets that there used to be.

"It is a well-authenticated legend that Cobalt built up the St. Clair Avenue district, Noranda and Hollinger built Moore Park, and nickel, Forest Hill." - Toronto Star, Jan. 29, 1921

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by Loco101

.... I think that because Toronto is now the most successful major city in the Great Lakes region that there isn't the same level of reliance of Great Lakes state markets that there used to be.

By what measure? Certainly not by economic output.

Metropolitan GDP US$ (2022)

Chicago $832.9 billion
Toronto $349.2 billion
Detroit $305.4 billion

Granted Chicago has a population about 35% larger but its economic output is well more than twice the size. Metropolitan Detroit has a smaller population but a larger per capita product.

The news is quite grim on the economic front. Numbers were released yesterday with respect to national economic growth in 2023. While the economy grew by 1% it grew much slower than the population (2.5%). Canada's GDP per capita has declined for five consecutive quarters. The OECD also predicts Canada will have the lowest growth amongst the developed economies for the next several decades, though attaching very much weight to long term projections is unwise. It does look though that barring some very unforeseen event Canada will slip out of the top 30 in GDP per capita (PPP) by 2030.

Greater Montreal's GDP was $170.7 billion in 2022.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by ScreamingViking

It could also relate to manufacturing sectors in other nearby cities and how they fit into the regional supply chains. E.g., Hamilton had a textile industry that employed more than Toronto's (4,501 vs. 4,365) but its clothing manufacturers employed far fewer people (471 vs. 11,386). Perhaps a lot of textiles made in Hamilton were put on trains heading to Toronto?

Interesting to see those old numbers!

It is.

Brantford was a center for agricultural machinery, Kitchener for rubber products and furniture, Hamilton for steel and electrical, and of course cars in Oshawa and Windsor.