The jobless rate for the Toronto region — at 8.4 per cent in December — is the second highest among Canada’s major urban centres.

It is higher than the national average — 7.2 per cent — and it is even higher than that for cities like Windsor, which were harder hit by the 2008 recession, according to Statistics Canada data .

The city’s jobless rate is even higher when the numbers for the suburbs are stripped out of the StatsCan data for the Toronto area.

In a report delivered Tuesday to the city’s economic development committee, councillors heard the unemployment rate in Toronto proper had risen to 10.1 per cent.

“That’s a big concern,” said Peter Viducis, the city manager for economic and cultural research. “We haven’t seen that number for over a year.”

For people looking for work, it’s more than a statistic . It means they struggle to pay off student loans or to upgrade their skills. Or they find themselves competing with overqualified people for low-wage jobs.

“The market is just not good right now. There are no jobs out there,” said Lamin Kamara, 21. “I don’t know what’s going on with Toronto.”

Kamara, who was born in Sierra Leone but moved to Toronto when he was 9, owes $10,000 in student loans and has been applying for retail jobs with no success.

In December, the jobless rate for the entire country unexpectedly jumped to 7.2 per cent from 6.9 per cent a month earlier as the economy shed a surprising 45,600 jobs. The worst of the country’s major urban centres was St. Catharines, with a jobless rate of 8.8, according to the StatsCan figures released Friday.

Still, Toronto is underperforming the rest of the country and has been for some time.

“I’m not going to say it’s a dire situation. But it’s noteworthy that the local economy is underperforming much of the rest of the country,” said Doug Porter, chief economist for BMO Capital Markets, who remarked on the data in a note to clients.

“In a city like Toronto, there’s a community centre where people have to go to get free bread,” said Patricia Douglas, 57. “People don’t understand how difficult it is to make the little money that you have stretch as far as you can.”

Douglas has mostly been unemployed since 2009, when she left her job as a daycare worker due to illness. She’s trying to switch into administrative work and has applied for hundreds of jobs without success.

“I wish that someone, I don’t know who, from the province or the federal government, would come down here and roll up their sleeves and take a look,” she said, her voice breaking, “not just for a photo op, and not just to get your picture on TV, and not just because it’s an election year.”

The city’s jobless rate began rising above the national average in 2002 and has remained there since about 2006, Porter said.

In part, Toronto is suffering from some of the same international woes that pain the rest of the province.

“Ontario’s economy is dependent upon what’s happening in the U.S., and U.S. economic growth has been pretty slow,” said Alan Arcand, principal economist at the Conference Board of Canada.

In its fall forecast, the Ottawa-based think tank said once the final figures for 2013 are in, Toronto’s economy was expected to have grown just 1.6 per cent.

“That’s pretty weak and well below the historical average for the city,” Arcand said.

Calgary and Edmonton have much lower jobless rates — 4.7 per cent and 5.5 per cent respectively — which is not surprising, given they’re in the heart of the western oil boom

Last month, for the first time in a decade, Toronto’s jobless rate surpassed Windsor’s, which was 7.8 per cent.

“Sadly, this is not really a story about a great comeback in Windsor, although a recovery in the auto industry is helping give a small lift to employment there,” Porter wrote in his note to clients. “Instead the bigger story is the relative deterioration in Toronto.”

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Provincial budget restraints, weakness in manufacturing and more recently a slowdown in new home construction have all pushed Toronto’s jobless rate higher, he said.

“Construction employment has become a huge share of the labour force right across the country,” Porter told the Star. “Toronto and Ontario, in general, saw the biggest slowdown in housing starts last year, even though home sales did amazingly well.”

Big cities also attract more young people and recent immigrants, who tend to have higher unemployment rates. As a result, Toronto’s population growth is outstripping its ability to create jobs.

Chloe-Marie Brown, 23, has struggled all her life to find permanent work and at one point ended up living in a youth shelter.

She’s currently working in councillor Pam McConnell's office as part of an unpaid mentorship program and on a paid research project, but she considers herself underemployed.

Brown hopes to find administrative work so she can begin paying off a student loan she incurred while studying massage therapy and personal training. She wants to go back to school for physiotherapy.

“It’s kind of like a catch-22 … you can’t get a better job until you get an education, but if you can’t pay for education then you won’t get a better job,” she said. “I’m really tired, to be honest with you.”

The factors behind Toronto’s unemployment rate are complex, said Andrew Langille, a Toronto-based labour lawyer.

The U.S. recovery has been quite weak, youth unemployment is “staggeringly high” in Toronto and the outlying suburbs, and a lot of recent jobs have been precarious, part-time work in the service industry, he said.

“These are survival-type jobs and don’t offer people any kind of quality of life,” Langille said.

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