Around here, the small cheesy shops pay $12.00 to $14.00 an hour. The larger well established shops pay $22.00 to $26.00 an hour. Our biggest problem in Ontario is that due to Canada's poor immigration laws, we get a new boatload of "third world" immigrants every week, and these people have no idea of what it costs to live in canada. Some of them are damn good machinists, and when offered $9.00 an hour to start a machinists job, that is more money than they have ever dreamed of earning. They work and draw Canadian Government assistance (for settling new immigrants) for the first two years that they are here. When the government assistance money runs out, they realize that you can not live on $9.00 an hour in Canada, so they then want more money. Of course, they are immediately laid off or fired, and the shop owner is down at the docks the next day to catch the newest boatload of immigrant machinists. The outcome of this, of course, is that the shop owners who do not follow this practice can not be competitive in pricing their services to the public, so they have to cut everybodys wages to stay competitive!!!