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It's a well-known fact that manufacturing employment in Canada has been in decline over the past decade-plus.
Products that last longer, a shifttowards the greater use of robotics and that most talked-about factor of all, the outsourcing of work to often non-unionized and lower labour-cost locations in the southern U.S. and Asia, have all played contributing roles in reducing the number of production-line workers.
Ontario has always been the heartland of manufacturing in Canada.
Nearly half of the nation's 33 largest population centres (a.k.a. census metropolitan areas or CMAs) are located in the province.
Graph 1 shows the history of manufacturing employment in those 15 Ontario cities since 2000.
The level crept upwards to a peak in 2004, after which it steadily declined until 2010. During the past five years, there has been an almost...