Which Canadian metros specialize in what?

Given that this current recession is having very unequal impacts by sector (read my piece with John McNally), I thought it would be enlightening to see which Canadian metros specialize in which industries. This should help give us an idea of who is particularly affected.

I grabbed 2019 data from the Labour Force Survey for 60+ Canadian CMAs and CAs for 16 different sectors. Here’s the top and bottom leading CMA/CAs in terms of what proportion of their jobs are in that sector.

Much of these should come as no surprise: Wood Buffalo (Fort Mac) for oil and gas, Chatham-Kent for utilities (hello Union Gas!), Toronto for Finance, Gatineau for Public Administration. Note that the Labour Force Survey measures employment by where people live not where they work, so a lot of those ‘Gatineau’ workers actually work in Ottawa (and vice-versa, of course).

That said, I wouldn’t have guessed Sarnia was number one for accommodation and food services, or Guelph was number one for educational services.

Here’s a Google Sheet with data for each CMA. Hope you find it useful!

Lots of fun things you can do with this data. I thought it would be interesting to see what the most ‘typical’ metro in Canada is. I created a deviation score, which looks at how a metro’s sector mix deviates from the Canadian average. For example, 1.65% of Canadians work in agriculture. If the proportion for a CMA is 1.2%, they get a deviation score of 0.45% (1.65–1.2). I then add up the scores across all 16 sectors.

Not surprisingly, the least typical CMA/CA in Canada is Wood Buffalo (Fort Mac). More surprisingly, the most typical CMA/CA in Canada is… Hamilton.

Was hoping it’d be London, but nope. London is only 7th. Oshawa is 3rd. Shows how much the place has diversified over the past couple of decades.

Let me know what you find in the data!