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Zoom in, though, and it’s clear that you’d much rather be looking for work in Toronto than anywhere else.

Between 2007 and 2017, southwestern Ontario lost 21,900 jobs, according to Statistics Canada data the FAO crunched. Northern Ontario lost 20,800.

Ten years of population growth, trade, economic-development work by all governments, and now fewer people are employed in those big swaths of the province.

Eastern Ontario has gained 30,500 jobs in 10 years, though employment in this end of the province actually peaked in 2012 and has been stagnant since.

Greater Toronto, meanwhile, has added jobs every year since the recession, usually tens of thousands of them, for a total of 465,500 over 10 years. Central Ontario has added 129,300. That’s a big crescent of the farthest reaches of the GO transit network, from Niagara to Kitchener to Barrie to the Kawarthas. Greater Greater Toronto, really.

Premier Kathleen Wynne took grief this week over a tweet from “Sudbury News Now,” a joke account, which wrote that on a northern swing the premier told students that if they wanted “real success” in life, they ought to move to Toronto.

Wynne didn’t say that but the satirical line took in a spokesman for interim Tory leader Vic Fedeli, leadership candidate Christine Elliott, and a former commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police, all of whom were appalled. It would indeed have been a suicidal thing for a politician to say. It also would have been close to the truth.