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One of the most enduring myths about the National Capital Region is that our economy is immune from the dramatic ebbs and flows experienced by the country’s other major cities.

It’s not. During the past quarter century we’ve been hit by two dramatic downsizings of the federal government — one in the mid-1990s, the other in the early 2010s. Our economy has also been side-swiped by the telecom crash of 2001 and the collapse in 2009 of the largest private-sector employer, Nortel Networks.

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The region has been fortunate in one respect, however. The government and high-tech sectors — which together account for nearly 30 per cent of the total workforce — never shrank in tandem. When government employment fell in the 1990s, high-tech was resurgent. In the wake of Nortel’s collapse and the global financial crisis, the Conservatives padded the government workforce to offset the damage.