How we’re refuting conventional wisdom

“Most economists look at numbers like these and say they would like to see a trend over several months.” Thomas Storring director of economics and statistics with the Nova Scotia Department of Finance

We take good news where we can find it these days. And so, I pumped my fist in the air Tuesday upon learning that the first doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine could arrive next week, with four million more expected to cross the border by March.

I emitted a “yowza” later in the day when the latest intel from the province indicated that maybe, just maybe, we have managed to suppress a wintertime coronavirus outbreak.

The numbers don’t lie. As of Monday, a day in which eight new COVID-19 cases were reported for the province, we had just 90 active cases in all of Nova Scotia.

Monday, moreover, was the third day in a row in which the new case total was in the single digits.

I may sound complacent, like all I can see is the single shaft of light in the dark cloud, but I’m not. With a daughter who teaches junior high, I know that the spread through the school system is worrisome enough that the Nova Scotia Teachers Union is calling on the province to extend the upcoming holiday break, just to be on the safe side, a suggestion with which I tend to agree.

My mood was buoyant for another reason on Monday. All of this hopeful news on the pandemic front was backlit by something that, when I heard it the other day, seemed improbable.

According to Statistics Canada, Nova Scotia’s unemployment rate in November was 6.4 per cent, which happened to be the lowest in the land.

Not that might not be a big deal if you were in Calgary during the petroleum years, or perpetually booming Ontario or British Columbia.

But that was the first in the 44 years that the Nova Scotia government has been closely monitoring labour market trends that this province can make such a boast. (A small caveat here: those numbers were calculated before the most recent swath of restrictions were reinstated throughout the province.)

Not only that, we’ve regained 97 per cent of the jobs lost since the pandemic hit.

I will mercifully end the avalanche of stats after mentioning that the 468,500 Nova Scotians working in November was the province’s third highest employment level in history.

“Most economists look at numbers like these and say they would like to see a trend over several months,” Thomas Storring, director of economics and statistics with the Nova Scotia Department of Finance, said Monday.

That Nova Scotia has been chugging along in this direction since May is, in his view, “encouraging.”

Why? Because this implies what economists like Storring call a V-shaped recovery, in which growth continues at the same rate as before, implying that the downturn caused no lasting damage to the economy.

We don’t want to get too carried away here. Joblessness is hitting younger Nova Scotians and the people of Cape Breton and southern Nova Scotia the hardest.

While there’s been decent employment growth in a wide range of white-collar sectors like education, finance, health care and real estate, the job losses remain in retail, food services, accommodations, fishing, forestry and mining, where the economic pain has been immense.

Yet these recent statistics are interesting, don’t you think? On the face of it, they seem to refute the notion held in some jurisdictions that there is a trade-off between taking the kind of measures that will contain the pandemic, and fostering economic recovery.

After all, we’ve won praise around the world for the decisive way that our leadership has acted to keep the coronavirus at bay.

That doesn’t seem to have hamstrung our economy. On the contrary, explained Storring: “The experience we have had is that successful public health measures can contribute to an economic recovery.”

Even on a day with lots of good news, that, my friends, is worth a "woot woot."