Bay Street Tops Wall Street as Toronto Adds Jobs, New York Loses

(Bloomberg) -- It’s a tale of Toronto’s gain versus New York’s pain.

Employment in Toronto’s financial-services sector has surged over 10 years while major U.S. banking centers saw jobs disappear due to the lingering impact of the financial crisis, according to a Conference Board of Canada report. Toronto’s employment rose 25 percent, adding 54,580 positions between 2006 and 2016, according to the report. By contrast, New York had a 3.5 percent decline in finance jobs, while Chicago fell nearly 11 percent.

Toronto is second only to New York in terms of financial-services employment for North America, and the Canadian city ranks sixth worldwide on that measure behind Beijing, London, Shanghai and Tokyo, according to the report from the Ottawa-based think tank. Canada’s most populous city had 272,280 people employed in financial services as of 2016, which represents 8.5 percent of the Toronto area workforce.

Toronto is home to five of Canada’s six-largest lenders including Toronto-Dominion Bank and Royal Bank of Canada as well as Manulife Financial Corp. and Sun Life Financial Inc., two of the nation’s three largest life insurance companies.

To contact the reporter on this story: Doug Alexander in Toronto at dalexander3@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, David Scanlan at dscanlan@bloomberg.net, Steven Frank

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