Quote:
Originally Posted by Harrison
We must have the 2021 numbers by now, no?
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Statistics Canada only published the 2016 data in 2021. The geographic areas of 'Downtown' are based on Dissemination Areas (not census tracts), and as far as I can tell, data for employment (rather than for residents) hasn't been published yet at that level.
They have released data showing place of work by census tract for 2021, (and also numbers working at home), but that data isn't available on the Statistics Canada website from 2016, so it's not possible to directly compare, unless they produce a publication that includes data.
In any case, 2021 data for employment will be very unhelpful, as so many people were working from home during the pandemic. In 2016 the Labour Force Survey found 7.1% of Canadians worked at home. In 2021 it was 24.3%, and it's has slowly fallen to 20.1% in 2023. [
source]
Some reports put the change at being even greater. "At the beginning of 2021, 32% of Canadian employees aged 15 to 69 worked most of their hours from home, compared with only 4% in 2016." [
source]. It's a topic that Statistics Canada have put quite a bit of work into, [for example,
this paper].
It will make calculations of 'employment' in specific locations quite difficult, and hard to compare to past data. The greatest number occupying a Downtown place of work in Canadian cities is now probably on Wednesday. Monday, or Friday would give a lower number. And while data might show that a Downtown office has 100 employees, that could be quite misleading. For example, earlier this year in the US "Kastle Systems, which operates card-swipe security machines in office buildings across the United States, said that the weekly average office occupancy rate at the end of March in the most populous U.S. cities was 49% of pre-pandemic levels." [
CNN]