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Jock Finlayson, chief policy officer for the Business Council of B.C., recently crunched the province’s employment statistics for last year. He found the number of forestry and logging jobs shrank by almost 10 per cent. Employment in mining and oil and gas dropped by more than 7 per cent.
Those declines reflect a combination of factors: international trade disputes, volatile commodity prices, weak markets, increasing regulation and rising taxes. Add to that, a growing recognition of environmental concerns, climate change and Indigenous rights, and you have a recipe for uncertainty, not optimism.
Policy makers should be alarmed, Mr. Finlayson says. And he’ll be watching the budget to see what they will do about it.
“We need a medium-term agenda for prosperity in B.C., which looks at the health of the business climate, ensuring we’re attracting investment, that we raise productivity over time,” he said in an interview.
