Minister discusses state of local economy
Carlos Leitão is bullish on Montreal’s economy.
The Quebec finance minister, who represents the West Island riding of Robert-Baldwin, said Montreal’s economy has been chugging at a brisk pace lately and is actually outperforming Toronto, Canada’s largest city, in some key areas.
Montreal’s unemployment rate reached its lowest level in over a decade in July, according to Statistics Canada.
The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for the Montreal census metropolitan area (threemonth moving average) was 6.3 per cent, while Toronto’s rate was 6.9.
The improving economic fortunes of Montreal come as good news in a city that ceded its mantle as Canada’s financial centre to Toronto decades ago.
Although Quebec’s provincial unemployment rate is at its lowest level since Statistics Canada started collecting data in 1976, Leitão said he’s seeing positive results beyond regular number crunching. “On two levels, on let’s say a technical or practical level, if you look at the economic indicators, the rate of unemployment and the rate of job creation, if you look at the numbers for the Montreal metropolitan area, clearly we’re doing better than Toronto,” Leitão said.
“Our rate of unemployment is lower than Toronto. Our employment rate is higher than Toronto’s. So from about mid-2015 on, especially the year 2016, we’ve really seen the economy of Montreal take off.
“So that’s on a purely, technical, economic level. Then as we talked to people on a more personal level, we see that renewed enthusiasm. People that I know, people that I talk with here in the West Island, the kind of things we were hearing in 2012, 2013 and 2014, especially young kids wanting to leave Montreal to go somewhere else, we don’t hear that anymore.
“People are happy to be here because they find that there are opportunities,” he added.
Leitão said he’s found that upbeat sentiment in his own riding.
“We do, but we also have to be realistic ... in that there is a section of Pierrefonds East and Roxboro where there are pockets of poverty,” he said.
“For a lot of recently arrived immigrants, there are issues of integration, there are issues of employment so we have to be aware of that . ... we have pockets of social issues we need to continue to pay attention to.”
What does Leitão attribute for Montreal’s recent economic turnaround?
“It’s a mix of issues. I’ve seen a lot of articles written about this recently . ... (government) policy has contributed to creating a new momentum for confidence. And once you install confidence, then employment, job creation, investment, all that starts to go in a virtuous circle, and leaves the vicious circle where you were before.”
The finance minister said Montreal also benefits from an educated workforce and places of higher learning. “We have said for a long, long time, one of the assets of Montreal was its cluster of higher-education universities. Now I think we are seeing the concrete benefit of that. Because in the new economy, if we can still use that term, artificial intelligence and other areas, it’s very much linked to the availability of research and to brainpower, and the fact we have four universities in the Montreal area contributes to that.”