Jobs Plan covers more than jobs
There are a few reasons why it takes 49 pages to outline the five-year update of the B.C. Jobs Plan. One is the pictures. Dozens and dozens of pictures of people, nearly all of them smiling. When they’re not smiling, they’re busy working. At jobs. Which is the point of the report.
Another is that it’s far more than an update of the Jobs Plan. It’s a comprehensive encyclopedia of all the credit government can claim for anything. The carbon tax won a prize at the UN. Victoria is the 24th best city in North America. “Liquor licences are now available for tourism events.” It’s all in there. The update is a compendium of accomplishments, reaching right to the back of the cupboard.
The first several Jobs Plans updates were 36 to 38 pages long. This one needs about a dozen more pages. It’s partly because there’s another year of good news to share, and partly because there’s an election coming and there’s a serious danger people might have forgotten about all the achievements and urgently need to be reminded.
This isn’t to fault progress reports. Some governments announce grand multi-year plans, then lose interest and go off and do something else. The BC Liberals deserve some credit for the regular updates since the first “Canada starts here” plan in 2011. But there is so much extraneous stuff that some of it obscures the function, which was to serve as a progress report on targets and goals set — versus actual achievements.
The update does own up to a few fall-downs. It acknowledges 15 out of 19 targets have been achieved, although it doesn’t go to the trouble of listing the missed goals. (They came up short on the number of new mines opened and the mines upgraded or expanded. They missed the target of a 50 per cent increase in international students by a few thousand. And of course, “three LNG plants up and running by 2020” is a thing of the past.)
More generally, the update also (grudgingly) recognizes a more serious problem — uneven regional growth.
Jobs Minister Shirley Bond is quoted in the report: “Many rural communities in our province are experiencing lower growth and employment rates.”
“Lower growth” is another way of saying no growth at all. StatsCan numbers suggest the bulk of the B.C. Interior is just holding steady and the Kootenay and the northeast are declining slightly. The vast majority of the new jobs are in the Lower Mainland and the Island.
There’s an emphasis throughout the plan on diversifying B.C.’s markets around the world. That has just been common sense for years. But with Donald Trump in the White House, it becomes an urgent imperative. Because no one knows what he’s going to do next, on trade or any other issues that might affect B.C.
For all the talk of diversification, though, there’s much work to do diversifying growth around B.C. The rural-urban divide is getting bigger here, as it is around the world.
The points driven home in the report are that there are 126,000 new jobs in five years and B.C. is top, or top-tier, in most national economic measures.
Premier Christy Clark has been about jobs since the day she took over. The job focus won her the 2013 election against long odds, and the Liberals think it will work again.
And for all the reservations about how relentless the promotional effort is, it’s one more Jobs Plan than the NDP has come up with to date.
Les Leyne covers the legislature for the Victoria Times Colonist. Email: lleyne@timescolonist.com.