With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1332052
HOUSING STARTS PER 10,000 POPULATION (10%) SHARE OF WORK- FORCE IN ACCOM- MODATION AND FOOD SERVICES (10%) SHARE OF WORKFORCE IN WHOLESALE TRADE (5%) SHARE OF WORK- FORCE IN INFORMA- TION, CULTURE AND RECREATION (5%) RESIDENTIAL SALES PER 10,000 POPULATION (10%) • Our ranking only includes cities of 10,000 or more permanent residents. • We excluded bedroom communities like Lake Country, Oak Bay and West Vancouver, which may offer a high quality of life but have small job markets. • Langley and North Vancou- ver are represented on the ranking by both their city and district municipalities. • Although we use the term "city" throughout, our annual survey is technically a ranking of municipalities, as legally defined by the B.C. Local Government Act. • We work with research partner Environics Analytics because we believe it has the best data available–but even that has limitations. To produce municipal- level population growth numbers, for example, the firm used regional-level estimates from Statistics Canada to make 2020 projections. • Job numbers and unem- ployment rates come from StatCan's monthly Labour Force Survey and only pres- ent figures for B.C.'s eight economic regions and four census metropolitan areas for the first three quarters of 2020. Similarly, monthly housing starts figures provided by Canada Mort- gage and Housing Corp. and quarterly residential sales figures from BC Assessment only reflect the year-to-date figures collected to the end of September. As such, those indicators won't account for economic trends over the final quarter of 2020. • CHANGE IN JOBS PER 10,000 POPULATION (10%) AVERAGE ANNUAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATE (10%) 2021 RANK 2.3% 3.9% 8.1% 170 212 –128 7.9% 2.5% 3.6% 11.2% 180 294 186 8.7% 1.8% 3.9% 8.9% 160 169 –128 7.9% 5.5% 4.2% 6.5% 105 148 –563 9.2% 2.9% 3.6% 7.1% 136 109 –128 7.9% 2.4% 3.5% 6.8% 105 60 117 8.6% 1.9% 4.0% 9.8% 178 85 186 8.7% 3.0% 4.3% 7.9% 156 108 –82 7.8% 2.3% 5.4% 6.1% 91 12 –128 7.9% 3.0% 4.8% 9.6% 150 64 –82 7.8% 2.2% 3.5% 7.5% 137 9 186 8.7% 2.8% 2.9% 7.4% 150 56 –480 9.0% 1.6% 8.5% 27.7% 180 45 –480 9.0% 2.3% 4.9% 7.5% 176 33 –480 9.0% 2.7% 3.8% 6.5% 121 36 117 8.6% 4.0% 2.5% 7.1% 99 53 –364 7.1% 1.6% 5.1% 9.5% 123 50 170 10.0% an incongruent mix of small resource- dependent communities and some of Metro Vancouver's largest urban centres. Less surprising, perhaps, cities like Wil- liams Lake (No. 40), Port Alberni (No. 47) and Quesnel (No. 50) continue to struggle against the long-term decline of the B.C. forest products industry. There are prom- ising new signs of life for forestry, partly driven by a hot home renovation and con- struction market. But a sluggish global economy probably won't do the industry any favours this year, Peacock reckons: "Growth at the global level is still expected to be a drag on B.C.'s export sector." One of the less anticipated outcomes of COVID-19 has been its lopsided impact on B.C.'s most urban areas. Surrey (No. 38), JUST SO YOU KNOW: Category weights shown in brackets; NR=not ranked. Full methodology on page 49 BCBUSINESS.CA JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 BCBUSINESS 47 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17