Moderate economic growth predicted
While Niagara Workforce Planning Board executive director Mario DeDivitiis says local employment statistics aren’t as bad as a Conference Board of Canada report suggests, he’s encouraged by the “positive trajectory” of the region’s industries.
The report, called Metropolitan Outlook 2: Economic Insights Into 15 Canadian Metropolitan Economies —Summer 2017, describes recent employment numbers for the region as disappointing, while predicting moderate growth for the area in the years to come.
The report, published Thursday, says employment in Niagara is expected to decline by one per cent this year after dropping by 0.7 per cent a year earlier.
Although almost 9,800 jobs were created in the region between 2013 and 2015, the report says “this rate of growth turned out to be unsustainable.”
DeDivitiis, however, says the statistics aren’t as bad as the report suggests.
“We don’t put much weight in terms of monthly data, just because it’s not seasonably adjusted and it causes a lot of volatility,” he says.
Employment fluctuations, he adds, aren’t uncommon in regions with successful tourism industries.
“It’s standard to see these fluctuations up and down in employment,” DeDivitiis says. “When I look at it from an annual perspective, we’re around seven per cent, which is where we have been. That up and down, whether it shoots up to 7.4 and drops us down to 6.7 per cent, it has a way of working itself out back to that seven per cent.”
The Conference Board report also includes a positive long-term forecast in the years leading up to 2021. In that time frame, the Conference Board predicts 10,700 net new jobs will be created, dropping Niagara’s unemployment rate to 6.3 per cent.
DeDivitiis says the moderate but significant growth in manufacturing was also an encouraging sign for the region.
“We haven’t spent the time to determine why, but those numbers are on a positive trajectory.”
DeDivitiis says Niagara is already “ahead of where we were in manufacturing last year.”
“We would call that statistically significant growth.”
The Conference Board of Canada report predicts the pace of growth to increase in years to come, fuelled by the low Canadian dollar and healthy U.S. economy, as well as by the $240-million investment in the new General Electric plant in Welland and the $120-million investment in General Motors engine and transmission plant in St. Catharines.
Meanwhile, DeDivitiis says Workforce Planning Board members met with Ontario’s Finance Minister Charles Sousa last week, and suggested expanding the provincial government’s Local Employment Planning Council pilot project to include local communities.
The project — part of the province’s efforts to modernize employment and training programs and services while enhancing labour market information analysis — is running in eight Ontario regions.
Introducing the pilot project in Niagara, too, could help address concerns about skills gaps in the region, as well as labour shortages, and changing job demands.
It would provide more insight into specifically the types of jobs that are being created in various industries.
“The next layer of understanding is what type of jobs are they?” De Devitiis says. “Are they good paying jobs or are they not?”
The Conference Board report included economic assessments of St. John’s, N.L.; Moncton and Saint John, N.B.; Saguenay, Trois Rivières and Sherbrooke, Que.; Kingston, Oshawa, St. Catharines– Niagara, Kitchener–Cambridge– Waterloo, London, Windsor, Sudbury and Thunder Bay, Ont.; and Abbotsford–Mission, B.C.
Of those communities, Oshawa and Windsor are expected to have the fastest growing economies this year.