For an election that supposedly hinges on public concerns about cost of living and affordability, there’s been surprisingly little attention paid so far in this campaign to traditional bread-and-butter economic metrics.
We’ve heard many comparisons between plastic and cardboard straws — but hardly any comparisons between wages and prices. We’ve heard calls to fire the provincial health officer and hire a new one — but next to nothing about the pace of hiring and firing in the overall labour market.
If you’ve paid much attention to dark memes about how B.C. is falling apart, you’ll be surprised to learn that the provincial economy has actually fared relatively well over the past several years.
Despite the pandemic and its aftermath, including a temporary outbreak of post-lockdown inflation, B.C.’s economy has progressed well by all standard indicators: employment, income, GDP, investment and even productivity. Like other provinces, B.C. faced daunting macro and global disruptions during and after COVID. But B.C. traversed those challenges well, consistently placing at or near the top of provincial rankings by most metrics.
Here are five quiet achievements of B.C.’s economy over the last five years — things you probably haven’t heard about, but should. Links to the original Statistics Canada data are provided for each indicator; if your eyes don’t believe what they’re seeing, you can always crunch the numbers for yourself.
1. BC has the fastest per capita GDP growth in Canada.
Much airtime has been devoted to Canada’s falling real economic output per person since the pandemic. We’ve managed to avoid an official recession, and GDP is growing — but more slowly than the national population. So in average per capita terms, we seem to be going backward. This is a core talking point in Pierre Poilievre’s effort to convince us that “Canada is broken.”
There are many problems with measuring well-being by per capita GDP. But the argument really starts to crumble when the data is parsed provincially. There are three provinces where per capita GDP has grown over the last five years: P.E.I., Quebec and, at the top of the heap, B.C. Average provincial real GDP per capita was 2.4 per cent higher in 2023 than five years earlier — compared with a 0.6 per cent decline in Canada overall in the same time. Neighbouring Alberta experienced a 5.6 per cent decline, second worst of all provinces.
2. BC has the lowest ratio of unemployment to job vacancies in Canada.
This relatively strong economic growth in B.C., and resulting job creation, have kept B.C.’s unemployment rate consistently lower than that of most other provinces. B.C.’s unemployment rate — 5.8 per cent in August — is the third lowest of any province, and has remained well below the Canadian average throughout the pandemic and its aftermath.
Lower unemployment and above-average job creation make it easier for unemployed people to find work. A common measure of labour market “tightness” is to compare the number of unemployed people with the number of vacant jobs reported by employers. That shows how much competition there is for each available job. This ratio has grown in all provinces since the Bank of Canada raised interest rates to deliberately cool off the labour market.
In B.C., however, that ratio was lower in the second quarter of 2024 (the most recent data) than in any other province: 1.6 unemployed per vacant job, one-third below the Canadian average (2.4). That’s a major reason why the average duration of unemployment in B.C. was two weeks shorter than the national average in August. In Alberta, there are 2.7 unemployed for each job opening, and it took more than a month longer than in B.C. to find work.
So while the labour market has cooled everywhere in Canada, as the Bank of Canada intended, it’s remained considerably stronger in B.C. than in most provinces.
3. BC has the highest hourly wages in Canada.
Stronger economic growth and lower unemployment naturally support healthy wage growth, and this has been the case in B.C. Also helping have been various measures implemented by the provincial government to proactively boost wages — including the highest minimum wage of any province, labour law reforms to support unionization, and wage settlements for public sector workers that matched inflation (unlike many other provinces, which suppressed public sector wages well below inflation).
Thanks both to market forces and to active policy, average wages for B.C. workers have grown robustly. Average wages for hourly employees grew at an average rate of almost four per cent per year over the last five years, third fastest in Canada. Including salaried workers, and adjusting for growth in average hours worked (boosted by strong full-time job creation), average weekly earnings for employees grew 4.6 per cent per year over that time — the fastest of any province.
That was fast enough to stay ahead of consumer prices, despite the surge in inflation after the lockdowns. Adjusted for inflation, average real weekly earnings for B.C. employees were six per cent higher in 2023 than in 2018 — again, the best of any province. Indeed, by 2023 B.C. claimed the title of highest wage for hourly employees in Canada, wresting it away from longtime leader Alberta, where real wages fell five per cent in the last five years.
4. BC has had the fastest growth in capital investment in Canada.
Judging from Chip Wilson’s lawn sign, B.C. is now a communist enclave: a place where he and other billionaires with money to invest fear to tread. You’d never know that, however, from hard numbers on capital spending in the province.
In the five years to 2023, non-residential capital spending (including structures and machinery) in B.C. grew at the robust pace of 13 per cent per year. That’s more than twice as fast as the Canadian average, and significantly faster than in any other province. (In contrast, capital spending in neighbouring Alberta, which would welcome Chip Wilson with open arms, grew two per cent per year.)
Some of that capital spending was on major public projects, including hospitals and transit. Some of it was on private megaprojects, some of them controversial (like Kitimat LNG). Some of it was spent on small business projects dispersed across the province. These numbers do not include business investment in intangible intellectual property and research, which also grew faster than in any other province, thanks to B.C.’s tech boom. Put all together, this investment growth was a powerful and under-heralded economic engine, explaining much of B.C.’s strong GDP and employment performance.
5. BC has the fastest productivity growth in Canada.
This might be the most gobsmacking of all of B.C.’s economic gold medals. Everyone knows that free-market capitalists are efficient, while tax-and-spend socialists are definitely not. Yet it turns out that B.C.’s balanced model of private and public growth has powered the fastest productivity growth of any province.
Real labour productivity per hour grew six per cent in B.C. from 2018 through 2023. Again, that’s more than twice as fast as the Canadian average, and faster than any other province. Meanwhile, labour productivity declined two per cent in market-worshipping Alberta over the same period.
There must be more to productivity than just axing taxes, cutting red tape and suppressing wages — all to fatten profits and unleash the trickle-down tiger.
Perhaps investing in skills, health and infrastructure — and then sharing the gains of productivity growth through managed higher wages — is a better strategy. B.C.’s success in nurturing new high-productivity industries, including the tech sector, green manufacturing and more, also lifts productivity performance.
Why so quiet?
These numbers directly refute the claim that B.C.’s economy is being driven into the ground by expanded public services, strong wage growth and taxes. The sharp contrast with neighbouring Alberta, poster child for aggressive trickle-down policy, is especially uncomfortable for true believers of the free-market model.
We should be careful not to overly politicize these statistics. After all, provincial governments have surprisingly little impact on overall macroeconomic trends — which depend far more on national and global factors, technology and geography than on which party inhabits the legislature. But it is nevertheless surprising that B.C.’s broad economic success has not attracted more attention in this campaign.
Opposition parties are naturally reluctant to discuss these indicators. Conservatives like to boast they are naturals at “prudent economic management” — and their business backers echo that refrain. Why would they draw attention to the fact that B.C.’s growth, investment, productivity and wages are all the best in Canada? That doesn’t sound “broken.”
I’m more surprised, however, by the NDP’s apparent timidity in fighting on this terrain. Perhaps it reflects a traditional lack of confidence among social democrats to take on economic debates, preferring to stick to more comfortable social issues.
There is also a cautious empathy visible in NDP campaign material. They acknowledge that despite these strong aggregate numbers, many British Columbians clearly face significant financial and other challenges, like housing costs, health care and inflation. The party may fear that sounding boastful about an economy that’s strong, but where many still struggle, might rub the wrong way. Hence the platform’s careful language about “helping people now” with “tough challenges.”
Democrats in the United States face a similar quandary. The economy there is beating the pants off every other industrial country, by every conventional measure (unemployment, real wage growth, business investment and more). Yet in some quarters there’s a lingering feeling of “vibecession” at odds with the strong data. Consumer confidence indicators are improving in both the United States and Canada, thanks to falling inflation, growing real incomes and improving stability, so this general anomie is likely to fade.
But will that occur in time for B.C.’s election on Oct. 19? Crafting a message that acknowledges the hardship all communities, including B.C., have faced since COVID, but that takes a bit more credit for the good things that have happened, could be a promising strategy for the final push of David Eby’s campaign.
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Read more: BC Election 2024, Labour + Industry, BC Politics
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