Strong economy belies uneven growth in jobs
Employment growth and the economy are cornerstones of the B.C. Liberal party’s bid for reelection.
“It all starts with a job,” is the leading point of the party’s campaign platform, under the title of Strong B.C., Bright Future, and B.C. has experienced solid job growth, particularly over the last two years. As of April, the province had the lowest unemployment rate in the country at 5.4 per cent.
There are cracks, however, in the picture presented by the headline claim of 222,000 net new jobs having been created since 2011, with stats showing that the job growth hasn’t been equally shared across the province.
By the end of 2016, B.C. saw the strongest gain in employment in a single year since the 1990s, said economist Ken Peacock, vicepresident at the Business Council of B.C.
“(The B.C. Liberals) are on fairly solid ground with employment growth,” Peacock said, with twothirds of new positions generated by private sector employers. “I take that as another positive indicator about the underlying health of the provincial economy.”
B.C. also stands out in the Canadian context because it hasn’t been exposed to the downturn in the country’s energy sector that has ravaged provinces such as Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador, Peacock said.
Digging into the statistics, however, reveals that the picture is more complex.
A relatively high proportion of those new jobs are part time, a significant number of British Columbians are still working for low pay, and employment growth has virtually all been concentrated in B.C.’s biggest urban areas while the workforce has actually shrunk in other regions.
“In some regions, like the north and Interior, the total number of jobs that exist today are lower than the number of jobs before the (2008-09) recession,” said Iglika Ivanova, senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Regionally speaking, the deepest reduction in overall employment happened in the North Coast-Nechako economic region, which saw an almost six per cent decline, according to a January analysis of Statistics Canada data by CCPA.
Other regions, such as the Cariboo and the northeast, also saw employment shrink by more than five per cent over the period, Ivanova said, although job growth has started to bounce back in the Peace River communities.
These are regions that suffered from the downturn in commodity industries that came on the heels of the global recession and have been slow to recover.
“That’s an important piece of the puzzle and helps us figure out why people identify the economy and jobs as one of their main concerns (outside of the Lower Mainland),” Ivanova said.
And of the new jobs being created, almost half have been part time and in sectors that don’t necessarily pay well, such as retail and other services, Ivanova said.
Peacock argued that the definition of part time, which includes jobs less than 32 hours per week and individual choices to work less, make the picture more “nuanced.”
“I get the sense that with flexible employment arrangements and millennials who might not want full-time employment, I think there’s more to the story than there’s just not necessarily goodquality jobs.”
However, with about 21 per cent of workers in B.C. on part-time status, the highest in Canada, it points to gaps in their ability to get ahead, according to the B.C. Federation of Labour.
Some people may be choosing to work part time, said Irene Lanzinger, the federation’s president, but many on part-time status would prefer to work full time.
Instead, they find themselves in part-time, term-limited or contract work that pays fewer benefits.
“There is an interest for all of us in people having good jobs with decent wages and benefits,” Lanzinger said, “because it means people can raise a family and kids don’t wind up in poverty.”
Small business growth may also be harbouring signs of stress in the job market with more people feeling pushed into starting businesses as a last resort in a culture that overemphasizes entrepreneurialism.
Entrepreneur and mentor Donovan Woolard sees it in applications to the Radius business incubator at SFU’s Beedie School of Business, where he is co-director.
“Entrepreneurship is hot,” said Woolard, co-director of Radius, but starting a new business isn’t the best fit for everyone being drawn in out of apparent necessity.
For the wrong person, entrepreneurship can sell them on “working contract to contract and being precariously employed because it has a sexy term attached to it,” Woollard said.
“I wish there were better, more stable jobs for those folks to move into.”
There are other measures of wealth in the economy that government should be worried about, such as the purchasing power that younger workers have with fulltime wages, argues Paul Kershaw, founder of Generation Squeeze.
Kershaw’s group has calculated that today’s 25- to 44-year-olds have about $10,000-per-worker less in spending power compared with baby boomers at the same age, which is part of why it has declared that B.C. has “the worst-performing economy” in Canada for that demographic.
“It’s probably fair to say more British Columbians are working now than ever,” said Kershaw, who is also an assistant professor in the University of B.C.’s school of population and public health. “But what does that mean? The population is (also) bigger than it’s ever been.”
The B.C. Liberals maintain that job growth remains a pillar of their strength, which the platform promises to build on with initiatives to boost the technology sector, to continue pursuing a liquefied natural gas export sector — albeit with revised goals — and increase efforts to diversify markets for forest products.
“We have worked on diversifying the economy,” said Shirley Bond, the incumbent MLA and Liberal candidate for Prince George-Valemount, “in tourism, technology and agriculture.”
“One of the things we’re working on is how do we help rural areas and we’re going to continue focusing on how to help those regions diversify.”
The government-appointed Cariboo-Chilcotin MLA Donna Barnett, who is running for reelection with the Liberals, as a minister of state for rural economic development, is guiding efforts, Bond said.
And government established a three-year, $75-million so-called “rural dividend” program to support community efforts at diversification, which the Liberal platform promises to repeat over the next three years.
The B.C. NDP and B.C. Green parties, however, counter the Liberals’ rosy message by highlighting where jobs have been lost or where jobs have been created haven’t kept up with economic expectations.
The NDP platform characterizes the Liberal record as an economy that hasn’t worked for a lot of British Columbians, especially outside of Metro Vancouver.
“If you look across rural British Columbia, the economy is actually not doing that well,” said Harry Lali, the NDP candidate for Fraser-Nicola and a former longtime MLA in the region.
Lali argued that the Liberal government has neglected opportunities to help bolster more rural regions of the province through its own capital spending, which is something his party’s platform focuses on as a means for job creation.
Building schools, hospitals, highways and rapid transit would create 96,000 jobs over the next five years, the NDP platform promises.
And the platform vows to use public support in building 114,000 new units of affordable housing as a means to spur demand for B.C. engineered wood products and stimulate investment in rural forestry.
B.C. Green party Leader Andrew Weaver criticized the governing Liberal record for not focusing enough on the quality of jobs being created.
A key plank in the Green party’s platform is a strategy to focus on building the “new economy,” promising to spend $275 million on supporting business incubators, mentorship and an innovation commission to spur high-tech and innovation.
“Liberals will tell you we have economic growth and job creation,” Weaver said in releasing his own party’s job-creation plan. “What they won’t tell you is many of the jobs are short-term, part time and lower paid.”