Quote:
Originally Posted by eternallyme
Much of Ontario seems to be turning into a rust belt, with no end in sight...
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While everyone's expecting a bubble (and I'm no expert--maybe it's coming), there are still bidding wars for houses in Toronto, and now Hamilton, too. Manufacturing plants are popping up all over the place; it's really noticeable in Stratford, where I live. That new Toyota plant down the road in Woodstock is a serious economic engine, with spin-off industries sprouting up everywhere.
There's no sense of decline around here that I can see. We all know that Toronto's booming, we've all seen the shots of the skyline and the cranes, and those kinds of things tend to inform part of our impression of how things are going, rightly or wrongly.
There's no exodus. While there's an awareness that there are jobs to be had in Alberta, they tend to be characterized as blue-collar offerings for young guys who want to make a fast buck in an oil field. There's no sense that there's a strong draw away from Ontario that I can tell. Indeed, this is still considered a popular destination. Anecdotally, I'm acquainted with quite a few natives of western provinces in their twenties and thirties who came here for professional or high-paying occupational jobs (electricians, etc.), while none of the children of my friends or acquaintances have moved out west. That's just anecdotal, obviously, but still, I'd feel a lot differently if I knew of a lot of 25-year-olds complaining about a lack of jobs and moving away.
I think some people don't understand how massive Ontario is in a Canadian context. At over 13.5 million it would be at the top of the heap of the second tier of U.S. states (the first tier for population being California, Texas, New York and Florida, of course). You've got lots of everything here: like St. Catharines, for example, which is not really doing all that well; or the tech triangle, which is bursting at the seams. Neither place definitively represents the province, though the Googlified ethos in Kitchener-Waterloo is closer to the "truth" about Ontario than the sadsack former GM employees of St. Catharines are.