OTTAWA — Never mind the fact that Ontario has been tagged as a "have-not province." Its economy, however sluggish, is big enough that when it goes sour, it drags everybody down with it.

Consider this: Stats Canada just released unemployment statistics for May. Manitoba and Saskatchewan gained thousands of new jobs: 3,900 and 3,100 respectively. Nova Scotia added 3,600 new jobs last month. Quebec stayed stable. So far so good.

Problem is, Ontario shed a mind-boggling 42,000 positions in May, most of them in the auto-related businesses, so in total, the national unemployment rate has hit a rate it hasn’t seen since 1999.

The overall national pogey rate rose by 0.4 percent last month, bringing the total unemployment rate to 8.4 percent.

While Ontario accounts for 39 percent of the total working-age population, it has experienced 64 percent of the overall employment losses since the start of the labor market downturn, which has been alarmingly precipitous.

Since the employment peak of last October, 363,000 jobs have been lost.

While this won’t come as news to people in trucking, warehousing and transportation also suffered severely and the only sector with a job increase was — surprise, surprise — the public sector.

For obvious reasons, the job losses hit men and women aged 25 to 54 the hardest while women over 55 scored the most new jobs.

A modest upside for people who managed to hang on to their jobs? Hourly wages went up by an average of 3.4 percent in May, compared with the same month a year earlier.