ECONOMIC BENEFITS: ALBERTA B.C.

TOURISM DOLLARS

Alberta is a billion-dollar player in B.C.’s tourism sector as the province’s secondlargest market for visitors after British Columbians themselves, as tracked by Destination B.C. Between Kootenay mountain ski trips and Okanagan lake vacations, Albertans took 2.9 million overnight trips to B.C., accounting for 14 per cent of B.C.’s overnight visitation in 2017, and spent $1.4 billion on hotels, restaurants and attractions. Alberta visitors mostly drive — 70 per cent of trips are by car or truck — and their average travel group is 3.1 people, who spend about five nights in the province and spend $479 per person. Just over one-third of their trips were to the Kootenays, 27 per cent visited the Thompson-Okanagan region, and 21 per cent of trips were to Vancouver and the Coast Mountains.

ENERGY

Alberta is considered Canada’s energy province more so than B.C., being the centre of the country’s oil production, but Alberta is also a big customer for B.C. energy. Electricity is less a factor — there is limited transmission capacity between the provinces, and B.C. was a net importer of Alberta power in 2016. However, the natural gas sector is northeastern B.C.’s core industry, and Alberta buys a substantial amount of B.C.’s burgeoning natural gas production, along with other liquid hydrocarbons that come with drilling in the energy-rich Montney shale formation that straddles the provincial border and surrounds Dawson Creek, Fort St. John and Hudson’s Hope. B.C. sold Alberta some $3.3 billion worth of natural gas in 2014, the latest trade figures available. B.C. Stats data for the same year report shipments of natural gas to Alberta at 23.6 billion cubic metres, a little more than half of the province’s production.

PORTS

Alberta accounted for $21.4 billion in imports and exports through the Port of Vancouver in 2016, which delivered considerable benefits for both provinces. Alberta’s 2016 exports to China, Japan and the rest of Asia totalled $5.7 billion alone, the Business Council of B.C. reported last summer. Alberta, like B.C., is a major exporter, but as a landlocked province, relies on transportation links across the province to ports in Vancouver and Prince Rupert to get its grains, manufactured food and chemical products out to the world. That activity supports thousands of jobs across the transportation chain, from railway employees to truck drivers, warehouse workers, and longshoremen at port terminals. In a 2016 economic impact report, the Port of Vancouver estimated that handling all maritime cargo created 36,000 jobs and $2.4 billion in wages within Metro Vancouver that paid an average of $68,000 a year, higher than the national average.

MERCHANDISE

Both provinces sell the majority of their exports to the United States, but as interprovincial trading partners, B.C. and Alberta are bigger customers for each other than China is for either. In a 2017 report, the Business Council of B.C. characterized their economies as arguably the most interdependent among any two provinces in Canada. B.C. sold $8.1 billion worth of material goods in 2014, more than twice what it traded with Ontario, its second-biggest inter-provincial trading partner, according to Statistics Canada data. Manufactured goods, at $3.7 billion, ranging from food products and lumber to mineral products and fabricated steel, were among the top categories of goods that B.C. manufacturers sold into Alberta that year. And Statistics Canada reported that B.C.’s trade in merchandise grew by 56 per cent between 2009 and 2014, the most between any other province except for Newfoundland.

SERVICE INDUSTRY

As big as their trade in material goods is, B.C. and Alberta trade more in services, ranging from transportation and administrative support services to accounting and engineering professional services. In 2014, B.C. sold $9.5 billion worth of services to Alberta, which again dwarfed its trade with China (Ontario was the next closest at $8.3 billion in 2014). And between 2009 and 2014, the value of services traded between the two provinces increased by 49 per cent.