Portrait of a dual economy unemployment by CMA

A recent column praising Canada`s supposedly low unemployment rate by L.I.Macdonald in the Montreal Gazette has prompted me to do a little further research on the true nature of unemployment in the country. One of the ways of guaging that is to examine unemployment by census metropolitan area, since the vast majority of the country live in these urban metropolises.
Fortunately Statistics Canada has data based on a three month moving average available as of March 2007. The portrait it reveals is that of a sharply divided dualist economy in which unemployment in the central and one of the eastern metropolises is high and in the western cmas very low.    

In addition, the participation rate in Calgary of 74.5 % if it were applied to cities like Montreal or Saguenay where actual participation rates are currently about 67 % would mean that unemployment in Montreal would be over 15 % and in the Saguenay over 18 %.

That is why to truly compare unemployment across the country in terms of its true impact we should actually divide the participation rate by the unemployment rate yielding a ratio that more accurately permits interregional comparison.If we were to do this we would discover that ratio for Calgary is 74.5/ 3.5= 21.28 versus Montreal 67/7.8=8.58. the higher the ratio the better off the situation . In other words the employment situation in Calgary is about 2 and a half times better than in Montreal.

The CMA rates of unemployment are as follows:
St.John`s     7.8
Halifax         4.9
Saint John     5.1

Saguenay     11.0 %
Québec         6.0
Sherbrooke   7.7
Trois Rivières8.6
Montréal       7.8

Ottawa     5.5 %
Kingston   4.5
Toronto     6.6
Oshawa     6.6
Hamilton     6.9
Ste.Catherine   7.5
Windsor       10.6
London         5.8
Sudbury         5.8

Winnipeg     4.9

Regina         5.0
Saskatoon     4.0

Calgary         3.5
Edmonton       3.5

Vancouver       3.7
Victoria           3.1