London Free Press

E ven if you've never been there, you know Allentown. A Pennsylvania factory city that fell on tough times in the 1980s, it was immortalized by Billy Joel in a hit song.

"Out in Bethlehem they're killing time," Joel sang. "Filling out forms. Standing in line."

Ontarians were always smug about the U.S. Rust Belt, taking cheap shots at the Lackawana, New Yorks, the Erie, Pennsylvanias, the Clevelands and other cities in the northeast and midwest. Like Allentown, many began paying the price of ruthless competition and globalization three recessions ago.

They were places whose waterfronts were marred by hulking ruins of heavy industry, places whose rivers spontaneously caught fire.

Couldn't happen here, we assured ourselves.

Add the newest circle of U.S. economic hell, the fallout of the credit crisis and 2008 recession, and you'd expect the Allentowns to be on their knees. Think again.

With a new Canadian jobs report due out this week, Ontarians might be shocked to learn many of their cities are no better off - in some cases, worse off - than those Rust Belt regions they've laughed about for so long. That's despite the fact Canada has long since made up its recession job losses.

Brantford, Peterborough, Barrie, St. Catharines-Niagara, Toronto, Windsor, even London - a manufacturing city, despite its insurance town reputation - are reeling from jobless rates higher than the national average, even higher than some sad-sack U.S. places.

Even leaving aside the obvious flaw in the stats, which don't measure those who've given up looking for work, there's an inescapable truth: Big parts of southern Ontario are rapidly becoming Rust Belt North, shifting from industrial to service economies. Even the smartest manufacturers aren't immune.

Like the Allentown region, which bled jobs in textiles, steel and truck-making, the London region has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs. It, too, lost a truck plant. It also recently lost a big Ford auto assembly plant, wiping out more than 1,000 jobs. Now, the job death toll threatens to rise by 700, with Caterpillar Inc. insisting workers at its London train-locomotive plant accept a 50% wage cut. Many fear the jobs could be moved to Indiana.

The Allentown region's jobless rate? About 8.1%. London's? It's 9.8%, the second-highest big-city rate in Canada.

The point isn't that Rust Belt states are doing better than you might think, though we should be thankful since they're Ontario's largest trading partners. It's that a new round of deindustrialization is undermining Ontario, with no convincing government strategy to offset it.

Taxpayers aren't the answer. After spending billions to prop up the economy the last two years, Ottawa and Queen's Park will have to pay the piper in the year ahead. Think civil service layoffs, not more make-work projects with cash hurriedly shovelled out the door.

Green energy jobs, the McGuinty government's mantra, won't cut it, either. The world needs only so many wind turbines.

In some cases, it means cities simply have to go back to their roots, doing what they did before big factories and big payrolls came along. London, for example, recently landed a Dr. Oetker food-processing plant. A German pizza-maker can't replace high-paying assembly line jobs. But food processing does play to the strengths of London, with its charmed location on Hwy. 401 and its ability to put together a local supply chain from the surrounding farm belt, the largest in Ontario.

You know Allentown because you just might live there.

The question is, will your kids - as Joel put it - "have a pretty good shot to get at least as far as their old man got?''

E-mail greg.vanmoorsel@sunmedia.ca or follow Gregatlfpress on Twitter.