Every year the Eastern Ontario Training Board puts out a labour market plan for the Cornwall area and the surrounding counties. It’s full of tables and acronyms and action items with boxes checked under columns marked S, M, and L for short, medium, and long term. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of document that gets released and then sits on a webpage that maybe two hundred people visit.
I spent time with the 2026 edition and I keep thinking about it. Not because it’s bad, it’s actually more honest than most of these things. But because of the distance between what the data is clearly showing and what the plan actually proposes to do about it. That distance is significant. And it’s growing.
Start with this number. Seventy-two percent.
That’s the share of tourism-related occupations in Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry where the majority of workers are already over 50. The people running the restaurants, driving the buses, staffing the heritage sites along the St. Lawrence. Three quarters of them are closer to retirement than they are to their best earning years, and there is no obvious wave of younger workers coming up behind them.
Cornwall had a good tourism year in 2025. Visitors up 26 percent. American tourists up 60 percent. The mayor talked about it at the annual year-in-review event in December, clearly proud, as he should be. The river, the history, the Seaway, people are coming.
Who’s going to serve them in five years is a different question. One the plan raises but doesn’t really answer.
The answer the plan keeps returning to is newcomers. And look, that’s not wrong. Between 2019 and 2024 almost 10,000 people net moved into SDG and another 10,000 into Prescott-Russell. Mostly working age, mostly 25 to 44. People making a deliberate choice to leave somewhere more expensive or more chaotic for something quieter, more affordable. That’s genuinely good news for a region that could easily be bleeding population instead.
But the federal government just cut immigration targets. Significantly. The report mentions this in the introduction, sort of buries it in a list of geopolitical disruptions alongside tariffs and AI, and then never really comes back to it. Never asks the question that seems obvious: if the main source of new working-age residents is about to slow down, and the existing workforce is aging out, what exactly is the plan?
What I keep noticing is the gap between what the community itself said it needed and what the plan actually commits to doing. In the consultations, real people told the board what was missing. Properly funded settlement services. Real removal of barriers to English as a Second Language. Actual training for employers on how to bring newcomers in and keep them. That’s specific. That’s honest feedback.
Then you read the action plan and it’s: maintain the welcome guide. Host a community connections event. Try to grow the newcomer ambassador group from 11 countries to 13 by 2027.
Two countries. By 2027. That’s the target.
I don’t say that to be cruel about it. The people doing this work are doing real things with limited resources. But something gets lost between the consultation table and the printed plan and I think we should name that honestly.
Okay, now here’s the part that actually gets under my skin.
The report is concerned about employers who can’t find workers. This comes up over and over. Employers are frustrated. Entry level workers lack reliability. They lack work ethic, communication, adaptability. These are the words employers used and the report records them faithfully.
Fine. Let’s look at what those jobs pay.
Food counter attendants, the single biggest occupation in the entire tourism sector, $16.61 an hour. Cashiers, $16.16. The largest category of job postings in the region is retail. Median advertised wage $22.21, assuming you get full time hours, which a lot of retail workers don’t.
And the employers are genuinely baffled about why people won’t stay.
There’s a habit in labour market planning, and this report has it, of treating worker behaviour as the variable that needs fixing while treating wages as a law of nature that nobody chose and nobody can change. Train the workers better. Improve their soft skills. Build their job readiness. The wages are just what the wages are.
But if you can’t fill a job, the straightforward answer is to pay more. That’s not a political statement, that’s just how markets work, the same logic these reports invoke constantly when it suits them. The document worries a lot about labour supply. It says almost nothing about whether the price being offered for that labour is part of the problem.
And then there’s the question of who is actually walking through the doors of Employment Ontario.
Seventy-one percent of clients in both regions have no income, or are on Ontario Works, or are on ODSP. Not low income. No income. These are the people the system is trying to connect to the workforce.
The barriers they face include, and the report does say this, lack of childcare and lack of transportation. In rural Eastern Ontario that’s not an inconvenience. If you don’t have a car and the warehouse job starts at six in the morning there is no bus. There is no option. You just don’t go. And if your kid has nowhere to be at six in the morning, same thing.
The action plan’s response is one bullet point. Champion additional resources for daycare and transportation. Champion. As in, raise it in a meeting. Express support for the concept.
I know the Training Board can’t build a transit system. I know that’s not their job. But I think there’s real value in a document like this saying plainly: the tools we have are not matched to the size of this problem. The workforce crisis here requires affordable housing and transit that runs and childcare that exists and wages that cover rent. Those are political decisions. And until someone with actual power makes them, we are mostly documenting a crisis we can’t fix.
One more thing and then I’ll leave you with it.
The AI section of this report is actually pretty good. Better than I expected. It doesn’t do the thing where AI is either going to take every job or is totally overhyped, it lands on the honest middle ground: AI transforms work, reshapes what tasks a job involves, without typically eliminating the occupation entirely. Clerical work is more exposed than care work. Data processing is more exposed than human interaction. That’s roughly right.
And then the action plan has not one single concrete thing about AI literacy. Not one. The report says this is urgent, says it should be happening at every level of education, cites researchers who are pretty worried about it. And then the plan just moves on to the next section.
The workers most exposed to AI-driven disruption are the exact same workers who are already the most precarious. The cashier at $16 an hour is more vulnerable than the financial manager at $62. If we’re not building AI literacy into the programs aimed at low-income job seekers right now, today, we’re going to be sitting with a much harder version of this conversation in a few years. And we’ll have seen it coming.
I want to be fair about something. The Eastern Ontario Training Board is doing real work. They concretely help the people in our area by opening doors and opportunities. I know first hand how effective they are. My son went through one of their programs and landed a fantastic Job, and it wasn’t a minimum wage job. The data in this plan is solid. The problems are described accurately. But there’s a version of this document that looks at everything it just found, the aging workforce, the wage stagnation, the poverty of the people using employment services, the coming slowdown in immigration, the AI transition nobody is preparing for, and says clearly: we need to escalate. We need to make noise. The tools we’ve been using are not enough anymore.
This version doesn’t quite get there.
It describes a slow emergency with the tone of a stable situation. And in Eastern Ontario in 2026, with everything that’s happening, I’m not sure we have the luxury of that anymore.
You can find a copy of the report here
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