[EXCERPT]
The business council’s Williams generally agrees. A tremendous amount of B.C. money is going into “housing-related consumption,” he says.
But investment dollars are not flowing strongly enough into such things as new machinery and equipment and intellectual property rights, said the business economist. Those sectors can much more add to the “economy’s future productive capacity” and potentially increase stagnant wages.
In-migration should not be seen as a cure-all for the economic woes of Canada or B.C., says Williams.
He questions the way Canada, particularly B.C., depends on “record immigration levels to turbocharge population growth and housing demand.” Canadian economists believe immigration numbers have an overall neutral effect on real wages and gross domestic product per capita.
