'London left behind': Report finds median household incomes stagnant over 15-year span

Household incomes stagnant in Forest City A new report says household incomes in London fell from top third in Canada to bottom third over the last 15 years. Brent Lale explains.

London, Ont. has seen a recent boom of nearly 50,000 jobs, however the years before that were lean.

A study of 36 metropolitan areas in Canada by the Fraser Institute showed the Forest City go 13th to 28th place in terms of median household income.

“London barely grew between 2005 and 2019,” said Steve Lafleur, a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute. “While the rest of the country was growing southwestern Ontario really got left behind.”

The study shows data from a 15-year period, just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Each of these large CMAs went from having median household incomes that placed them amongst

While some cities’ overall inflation-adjusted median household income increased by 11.1 per cent, London flat lined, gaining just 0.5 per cent.

“In 2008 to 2009, we lost a lot of jobs,” said King’s University College demographer Don Kerr.

“Ford closed down in St. Thomas. Caterpillar closed down and Kellogg's closed down. We're losing a lot of good paying jobs in the city, and it's taken some time to recover from that.”

However there has been a bounce back with new factories including the Maple Leaf plant opening in southeast London.

“Recently, there's been this big announcement out in in St. Thomas again attracting major investment with the car battery plant,” said Kerr. “That sounds encouraging so we'll see what comes of that.”

While London dropped 15 spots, Windsor plummeted from 11th to 33rd. With adjusted inflation, they declined seven per cent.

Manufacturing jobs have moved south to places like Tennessee, and both cities are too far to commute to major Canadian centres for higher paying jobs.

"London and Windsor are fairly large cities,” said Lafleur. “They are comparable frankly to some provinces. Southwestern Ontario is roughly equivalent to the Atlantic provinces. If we saw a decline like that in Atlantic Canada over 15 year period, that'd be pretty big news story.”

Kerr said the results of the report are consistent with what London has seen for a long time.

“Until recently, if you look at the proportion of young adults [that are] working age between the ages of 25 and 54, we're lagging behind most other census metropolitan areas in Canada,” said Kerr. “We lost a lot of good jobs, and we're getting a lot of job creation most recently so let's hope that some of these jobs or that are being created are going to compensate for that.”

The complete report can be found at the following link.