Economy and Labour Force
Toronto’s economy has gone through the stages of commercial lake port, railway and industrial hub, financial nexus, and high-level service and information centre. At present its port and commercial functions remain important, though relatively less so, apart from heavy retail activity. Its railway role persists, but has been modified by air and automotive transport. Although its industry has lost ground to foreign competition and Canadian decentralization it remains high in value; and its financial power continues to increase and its office-service sector stays pre-eminent in Canada. Toronto has a mixed economy not dominated by one single industry or sector. The city’s three largest industries are financial services, real estate, and wholesale and retail trade.
Banking head offices in Toronto include the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Bank of Nova Scotia and the Toronto Dominion Bank. Principal Canadian insurance and investment companies are centered in the city, and the Toronto Stock Exchange is one of the leaders in North America outside New York.
There is a close concentration of Canadian head offices of industrial, resource and retail corporations and of American or multinational giants ̶ from Avalon Rare Metals through to Xerox. Despite its diversity, however, Toronto was hit hard by the combined effects of the Free Trade Agreement with the US and by the recession of the early 1990s, resulting in high unemployment. The global financial crisis of 2008 also hit the Ontario economy hard, leading to a four per cent drop in employment between September 2008 and the recession’s lowest point in June 2009. Since then the economy has slowly improved, although Toronto’s July 2013 unemployment rate remained high at 8.5 per cent.
The city's labour force is chiefly massed in professional, clerical, manufacturing, retail and service work, in that order. It is widely unionized in public sectors, large private enterprises and skilled trades.
From the York printer's union of 1832, Toronto has been a centre of labour organization, though this did not become broadly based until the growth of industrialism from the 1870s. By the close of the First World War, the union movement was firmly established, and though its fortunes have varied, as in the grim 1930s, since the Second World War organized labour has been an influential economic and political factor in the city. To the present, Toronto labour has been largely stable and fairly conservative in character compared with other cities.