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“Since 2003, however, economic growth in Ontario has lagged the national average every year,” the report notes. From 1989 to 2002, before the latest Liberal era, provincial GDP grew 42.1 per cent compared to 37.7 per cent growth nationally. Since 2003, Ontario’s GDP grew just 15.8 per cent compared to 26.8 per cent in the rest of the country.

At the same time, more people are leaving the province and fewer are choosing to immigrate here.

More than 133,000 people left Ontario for other provinces between 2004 and 2014, an average of more than 12,000 a year.

“This is the largest and most sustained migration of people from Ontario on record, nearly double the loss in the late 1970s and early 1980s and a third more than in the early 1990s,” the report states. Immigration has also decreased: “Ontario’s share of immigrants arriving in Canada has fallen from 59.6 per cent in 2002 to a record low of 38.0 per cent in 2014.”

“When it’s gotten to the point that people living abroad understand the weakness of Ontario better than some of our leaders I think that is a very telling comment about the source of the problem,” Cross said.

While political leaders at Queen’s Park prefer to pin the province’s economic woes on the recession in 2008 and 2009, Cross says much of the rot predates that global economic downturn.

“All of these (issues) go back a decade. You cannot lay this at the foot of just the (previously high) Canadian dollar or just the recession,” Cross said.