This article originally appeared in the Financial Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Jack Mintz, July 3, 2023
After an exciting election night evening, Olivia Chow pulled a rabbit out of a hat to become Toronto’s new mayor. She will need to repeat the magic in coming years if she’s to revive Ontario’s sputtering economic engine.
In the past five years, Toronto’s population has increased by — drum roll, please — a paltry 3.7 per cent. That’s half the rate for the rest of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and well below both Calgary (10.3 per cent) and Vancouver (8.6 per cent). Even Montreal, despite anglophones departing, has grown faster (4.4 per cent).
But the City of Toronto’s economy has been growing even less quickly than its population. Per capita GDP (in 2012 dollars) has dipped from $59,204 in 2018 to $58,504 in 2022. The only real growth is in the cost of housing, which is up 20 per cent since the beginning of 2017. Weak supply is the problem, with housing starts having fallen from 27,761 in 2018 to 20,864 in 2022.
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