With a staggering 119,890 jobs lost, Toronto just saw its largest single-year employment decline in recorded history — and that was before the current eight-week-long (and counting) shutdown of all non-essential businesses and services.

We have the city's 2020 Toronto Employment Survey to thank for this information, plus a whole bunch of other unsettling economic facts.

Set to go before the Planning and Housing Committee at City Hall on Thursday, the 38th annual employment survey reveals that Toronto had 3,480 less business establishments by the end of 2020 than it did at the beginning of the year.

This represents a -4.5 per cent loss with 73,080 establishments tracked in total — 800 of them actually new to the city, suggesting that well over 4,000 businesses actually closed down for good over the course of 202o.

Small businesses (with one-four employees) were disproportionately impacted with reported employment declines of 82 per cent related to COVID-19.

The survey, which has been conducted every year since 1983, is meant to help monitor the City's economic health while influencing municipal government decisions and policies.

This year's results show that, perhaps unsurprisingly, service-based businesses such as restaurants, bars and hotels sustained the heaviest losses in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and resultant closure orders.

"Establishments in the Service sector reported being most negatively impacted by COVID-19 with net losses of more than 30,000 jobs across almost 2,000 businesses," reads the employment survey report.

"The largest job losses were reported at restaurants (over 11,000 jobs), hotels (4,000 jobs), coffee shops (1,800 jobs), and fast food outlets (1,900 jobs)."