One of the more forlorn sounds in Peterborough is the General Electric whistle, a ghostly hollow tone beckoning a handful of survivors of industrial decline to work. I live a couple of blocks away from the factory, and I hear it sound early every morning. Not one of my neighbours stirs.

The industrial giants of Peterborough’s past loom largely empty in a barren land like Ozymandias: “nothing beside remains.” GE’s workforce of a few hundred is roughly tied with that of Pepsi (better known as Quaker), well behind Trent University and Fleming College. The old Westclox building is a commercial park housing Minacs, a call centre. Outboard Marine is, fittingly, a museum.

Industrial decline isn’t the whole story of jobs in Peterborough, but it’s part of it. Add the collapse of manufacturing to the withering of the public sector over the last 25 years, and you have the ingredients of an unemployment crisis.

Sure, as Lois Tuffin recently wrote in a stunningly mean-spirited article, there are lots of jobs here. But a lot of them are poorly paid, casual, or otherwise precarious. The few that aren’t are hard to come by, even if you have the formal qualifications.

And the lack of opportunities for university-educated and highly skilled people means that a lot of low-skill, part-time jobs are held by people who don’t want them, while people with basic work skills can’t find any work at all.

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This is no secret. Peterborough regularly ranks among the highest unemployment rates of Canadian cities, topping the ranking in 2013, hitting 10.2% in March of that year.

But unemployment is a bigger problem in Peterborough than the official numbers suggest. The official unemployment rate is currently around 8%. That isn’t anywhere close to the real number of people who are affected by the jobs crisis.

Unemployment figures collected and broadcast by Statistics Canada only include active job seekers. People who’ve given up looking for a job, people who get by on incomes that are too low, and people who make their living in the cash economy or from outright illegal activities, aren’t counted.

For Stats Can, employed, unemployed, and no longer in the labour force are mutually exclusive categories. That means that if someone gives up looking for work, if they take a job that doesn’t cover their living expenses, or if they leave town, they disappear from the statistics.

To get a clear sense of what’s missing from the numbers, you have to talk to people. John Grace, Paul Matisz, and Natalie Guttormsson – who writes Electric City Magazine’s Groundings column – have three very different stories of unemployment and underemployment in Peterborough.

And they suggest different policy solutions: attracting a new company to Peterborough might not benefit John or Natalie, but it might have kept Paul and his family here; increasing public funding for civil society would increase Natalie’s chances of getting work that builds on her volunteer experience; recognizing caring for family members as important work and valuable experience would put John on a better footing to get a permanent job.

None of these people counts in the official tally of the unemployed in Peterborough, but all three are faces of the jobs crisis.











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John Grace was born in Nova Scotia, and went to high school and then university in Cape Breton Island. An avid fiction reader, he got an honours BA in English literature from Cape Breton University in 1985. He wanted to become a teacher, but there were no jobs for teachers at the time, so he didn’t.

Soon after John finished school, the family – John, his brother, their mother, and their aunt – started contemplating a move to Ontario. Although John had mixed feelings about it, and was contemplating becoming a minister, his brother led the family to Oshawa, where they settled in 1986.

By that time, John’s aunt was showing clear early signs of dementia, and his mother was terrified of the same thing happening to her. “It’s an illness that’s not hard on the sick person,” he says. “It’s hard on the person around them.”

John started working at a newspaper, Oshawa This Week, first as a proofreader, then doing various tasks in the composing department. He eventually got a column on the religion page. “I really enjoyed that,” he says, “interviewing people, meeting people.”

After about ten years at the paper, the religion section was cancelled for lack of advertising sales. So John started working at a bookstore, Half Price Books in Oshawa. He worked there for four years, and in that time he started really noticing a worrisome change in his mother.

One night she walked into his room at 3:00am and said “Are we late?” The dementia that she’d seen and feared in her sister had come for her.

Unable to work full time and care for his mother, John took a part time job at Chapters in the Oshawa Town Centre mall. “They took me at once,” he says, because of his experience at Half Price.

He worked evenings and took care of her during the day. At the time she was still pretty independent, could prepare a meal, and so on.

John liked working at Chapters. “I was always a reader anyway, so working with books – that appealed to me.” People would ask him about books, and he “enjoyed helping people.”

But the living situation was becoming a problem. They lived in a townhouse in Oshawa, a nice place, but the neighbours were always having loud parties. John and his mother knew people who lived in Peterborough, they helped them find somewhere to live.

Just after the move, John’s mother took a turn for the worse. He had thought he’d still be able to work part time, but it just wasn’t possible anymore. He got a note from her doctor, confirming that she required full time care, and was registered with Ontario Works as her caregiver in 2010. From then on, he says, “that was my job.”

Caring for his mother was really frustrating in that last year, and in the last few months especially, when she could no longer recognize him. She died in 2015.

A little while later, John ran into Natalie Napier, who was looking to talk to people who’ve experienced long-term unemployment for the Community Opportunities and Innovation Network’s Remaking a Living project. Now John is a star of the project, prominently featured on its website.

And John has a job too, working in the warehouse of Kawartha Food Share, the umbrella organization for all the local food banks. It’s temporary and part-time – eight weeks, three days a week – and it’s “pure physical labour,” John says. But it gives him something to do, and will give him an up-to-date employment reference, something his years as a caregiver denied him.

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Paul Matisz is an Information Technology professional who’s been actively looking for work for almost a year. In that time, he’s been part of the 8% of Peterborough that’s officially unemployed. But now he and his family are moving to the Niagara area.

He moved to Peterborough from Belleville in 1999. He had studied journalism at Loyalist, and came to Trent to do Political Studies, but swerved into English and Classical Literature.

After finishing at Trent, Paul ended up working at Global Telesales Canada, a call centre contracted by Lufthansa, the German airline, but it was a dead-end job with no growth and no prospect of a raise.

In his time off, Paul was active with the Society for Creative Anachronism, a living history group in which people practice medieval skills like armoured sword combat and archery. A powerful and skilled knight of Petra Thule (the SCA’s name for Peterborough), Paul also served as chapter president from 2013 to 2015.

The SCA’s medieval re-enactment isn’t strictly accurate; its activities are informed by more current ideas of racial and sexual equality. There are female knights, Paul says, maybe five to ten per cent. Renaissance fencing is closer to gender equity, with possibly more women than men. Paul met his wife Laura, a Renaissance fencer, through the SCA.

He also found out about a job from an SCA friend, a position at Bradley Ling and Associates. Paul interviewed for the job and got it in 2011.

Officially his title was Inside Sales and Support Co-ordinator, but basically he was doing the job of an Officer Manager. It was a very small company, with four full-time employees and one part-time, so they worked as a team, with everybody kind of doing everything.

It was a good job, the pay was good, and he had his own office. The company designed, built, and maintained computer networks for local businesses. He worked there for three years.

Then the economy collapsed, clients opted not to get work done, so the company was less busy and less profitable. Paul was laid off in February 2015 along with a co-worker, leaving only two people in the company.

“I really worked for the company and I had really invested in their success,” Paul says, “And there I was – terminated without cause.”

Paul started collecting Employment Insurance and began a dispiriting job search. He sent out half a dozen resumes a week. He was looking for something substantial, something commensurate with his experience as an office manager. “I’ve been looking for work for a year,” he says, “and there’s been very little to find.”

Tuffin’s snarky article hit a nerve when it was published, and Paul responded in depth on his blog. “Tuffin’s implication that as a job seeker it is somehow my fault for not being inspired,” he wrote, “is downright insulting.”

He also did some training, taking classes in bookkeeping, something that he did in his job, but his formal qualifications and job titles didn’t reflect.

Paul is quick to point out that his particular situation isn’t that bad. Laura has a good job as a Registered Massage Therapist, and they live with Laura’s mother, so housing isn’t a serious worry. That arrangement “has prevented us being in crisis,” Paul says.

Now the EI has run out, and Paul and his family have come up with another plan. Laura offered a transfer to St Catharines, and with both she and Paul having extended family in the area, it was easy to make the decision to move away.

Paul and Laura would have loved to put down roots in Peterborough, but without the possibility of making a decent living, there’s no future for them here. There are things they’ll miss, like “a few friends and really good Indian food – but that’s not enough.”











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Natalie Guttormsson is originally from Penticton, British Columbia, in the Okanagan Valley. After she finished high school, she went straight to university, spending a year and a half half-heartedly attending University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus.

When her mum and stepdad moved to Peterborough, she looked into Trent, and was intrigued to learn she could major in Spanish. Starting at Trent in 2008, she quickly fell in love with International Development Studies, and decided to major in IDS and Hispanic Studies.

In her second year at Trent, she heard about Arthur, the university’s weekly newspaper, and decided to get involved. She’d always been interested in Latin America, so she started writing about Latin American politics, writing regular news stories as a volunteer.

A lot of the stories seemed to come back to Canadian mining companies, and the negative social and environmental effects of the industry globally. After she’d written a few articles on the subject, three people from Ecuador visited Trent to talk about a Canadian mining company. The talk “made me want to do something more than just writing about it in Arthur.”

With two other people, Natalie applied to the Ontario Public Interest Research Group to be a working group, Canadians for Mining Awareness, in 2010. It was great to meet as a group, and to have that shared passion, but it was also frustrating, because the mining industry is so large, there are so many problems.

Mining activism quickly became her entire life. “No matter what I was doing,” she says, “I was living it.”

It took her six years to finish her degree. She went part-time, mostly to afford it, but also because activism absorbed so much of her energy. Throughout her time at Trent, she worked at Reitman’s at Lansdowne and the Parkway. When she graduated, she thought about going to graduate school, but an Assistant Manger position opened up at Reitman’s, and she took it.

Since graduating, she has applied for jobs that draw on her experience and knowledge as an activist and journalist, with no success. One application that particularly stung was for a job with Engineers Without Borders. She volunteered for them for two and a half years, then there was a posting for a paid position. She applied, and was then assigned a project that was intended to narrow the field of candidates. She didn’t get an interview.

In 2015, Natalie took an unpaid internship in Iceland. (Her family is Icelandic, and though she doesn’t speak the language, she has relatives there.) She thought before she went that the job would involve helping out here and there, but when she got there she discovered that she was pretty much running the museum. It was a difficult and, from a career perspective, kind of disappointing experience.

Coming back to Canada, Natalie was looking for work when she was offered an Assistant Manager position at the shoe company next to Reitman’s. It was a relief to have a job, and it reflected well on her experience, but it was a bit of a letdown. “I’m basically a salesperson,” she says. “I like the atmosphere, but it’s not challenging.”

She constantly feels the urge to make the work more interesting than it is. When a customer asks, “Why are leather shoes expensive?,” she wants to explain to them how global trade works. She knows enough about the process of manufacturing shoes to be critical of it, and it used to bug her a lot, but now she recognizes, “I need a job.”

Lately, she’s been looking into a career change, maybe becoming a recreational therapist and working with the elderly – “I really like old people, and I like the idea of not having to sell things” – but struggles to think of how she could afford more school. “I’ve pretty much decided to stop trying to get a paid job doing what I like doing the most.”