“While it is hard to start a family anywhere in Canada, young families in Ontario are struggling with the largest student debt loads, the most expensive child care, the worst access to affordable housing and highest costs for health care — all at a time when good jobs are being replaced with precarious, part-time and temporary employment,” Mehra said.

For instance, Ontario’s part-time workforce has ballooned from five per cent below the rest of the population to where it stands now, at eight per cent above other provinces. There are now 1.7 million people earning within $4 of minimum wage and over the past five years, cuts to public services amounts to more than $7 billion in per-person funding, according to the report.

The report also suggested Ontario’s long-term unemployment rate is the second worst in Canada and that there has been a 38 per cent jump in poverty over the past two decades, with one in five children living below the poverty line.