Talk about an anxious, unpredictable time.

Unemployment rates and deficits soaring. Nail-biting over the fate of Ontario’s auto industry. Nervous governments pouring billions into the economy — and crossing their fingers, too.

Sounds familiar? It’s not the Trump trade war that has Premier Doug Ford so preoccupied. It was the Great Recession of 2008, the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with housing and stock markets tanking.

Despite 700,000 unemployed Ontarians and a jobless rate expected to average 7.8 per cent this year, economists from two major banks say they expected worse in a province that saw unemployment nudge 10 per cent during the global financial crisis , the height of COVID-19 and an early 1990s recession that devastated manufacturing.

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