Doug Ford’s “look harder” comment explains why Ontario has no jobs plan: because he denies there’s an unemployment problem.
News from Data Shows, a professional, non-partisan data gathering venue based in Ontario, Canada
Posted September 17th, 2025 on Niagara At Large
There were 7,000 fewer job openings in Ontario at the end of June than March and there were more than 200,000 fewer openings than June 30, 2022, according to a Statistics Canada report released Tuesday morning.
The data comes just days after Ontario Premier Doug Ford dismissed job-searchers’ concerns [ https://substack.com/redirect/8b107836-f179-43c9-a953-38db581a1eb3?j=eyJ1IjoiM3g4b3BsIn0.gTyF7RtVaWrg4_JLvD63hvYzJPuyQCsAk-UibLfp0Ec ] in front of a downtown Toronto business audience.
“It drives me nuts” when young people today say they can’t find work, Ford complained to the business crowd as they tucked into their lunch. “If you look hard enough” the jobs are there, the premier said.
800,000 job-seekers, just 179,000 job openings.
But that’s not what the data shows.
Over 800,000 Ontarians were job-searching in August, according to StatsCan. That’s more than four times the 179,000 job openings reported as of June 30.
Vacancies have been trending down for three years, and now have fallen by more than half since June, 2022, when there were 378,000 Ontario job openings.
Currently, just 2.6 per cent of Ontario jobs are open, the second-worst rate among the provinces. Only in Newfoundland and Labrador are the odds worse for job-hunters.
British Columbia continues to be the best province for job-searchers with 3.3 per cent of jobs needing workers.
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Data Shows editor Tom Parkin
Data Shows’ editor is Tom Parkin. Contact me with interesting data, data chart or a guest piece you’d like to submit to Data Shows: tparkin@impact-strategies.ca .
Tom Parkin@tparkin Canadian columnist and commentator with a bluntly social democratic perspective. I write a lot about data that matters to our everyday lives. But sometimes it’s just plain opinion.
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Niagara At Large 
Rob Ford knows about looking hard for employment when he finished school. He had to make the effort to go to his family’s company!
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