The Tor-York West (TYW) megazone covers 6,800 hectares. This area, more than two and a half times as large as downtown Toronto, contained approximately 140,0001 jobs in 2011. This compares with 464,650 jobs in downtown Toronto, almost 300,000 in the Airport megazone, and just over 100,000 in the Tor-York East megazone.
The TYW megazone is an expansive, contiguous employment area, located around the intersection of Highway 400 and Highway 407. A large CN intermodal facility is in the area bounded by Highway 7 to the south, Keele Street to the east, Rutherford Road to the north, and Jane Street to the west. The megazone also includes the emerging Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, a formerly industrial area planned for high-density residential and office development, served by a subway station on the extended Spadina line, due to open in late 2017.
The TYW megazone extends from the City of Vaughan south of Steeles Avenue into the City of Toronto. It is due in part to this jurisdictional fragmentation that the TYW megazone has not been recognized nor planned for in the Growth Plan as the significant economic and urban district that it is.
Employment in the district grew by more than 7,000 jobs between 2001 and 2011. This represents 2% of the growth in jobs across the entire Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) during that period.
Most of the jobs found in the megazone are in "core" employment - that is, employment in tradeable goods and services that drive the regional economy and bring in revenues from outside the region.2 There were 112,705 core jobs in the megazone in 2011. However, this total represents an overall loss of about 500 core jobs between 2001 and 2011, reflecting the pattern for the GGH as a whole, which experienced a net loss of approximately 3,000 core jobs in that period, largely due to deindustrialization. (See Table 1 in the Appendix.) The manufacturing sector alone lost 183,925 jobs. Much of region's growth since 2001 has been in non-core (that is, population-related) sectors, which grew by approximately 77,000 jobs.
[1] Unless otherwise noted, all employment numbers quoted in this brief represent employment with a usual place of work only - jobs without a usual place of work and home-based jobs are not included. The data are drawn from the Census of Canada place of work data.
[2] As distinct from "population-related" employment that serves local population, such as retail, personal services, and local schools.