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/1441359
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022 BCBUSINESS 57 ISTOCK contends. "Every time we make a gain in another area—if people's wages rise a little or if their costs go down for child-care investment—it can still quickly get eaten up by increased rents." 16. The COVID immigration boom: blunder or blessing? Rennie Intelligence's Berlin was one of many observ- ers left puzzled by the federal government's pandemic immigration moves. At first, he was shocked to see Canada boost its target in the midst of COVID, given that it would inevitably result in a surplus of workers. The feds, who have set a quota of 1.2 million immi- grants for 2021-23, welcomed some 220,000 during the first eight months of last year. So the year-end total could be an all-time high of 370,000. For B.C., which gets about 14 percent of national immigration, that's good news, Berlin maintains. Besides potential labour, he says, immigrants bring diverse cultures and perspec- tives. "So I think that bodes well for setting us up as we turn the corner and put COVID in our rear-view mirror." B.C. also stands to ben- efit from robust interprovincial migration, Berlin says. From April 2020 through last June, we attracted a net 43,000 new residents from other parts of the country while most other provinces lost people. "If you look at it from, again, a labour supply perspective, to me, that's a good thing." With that population growth comes demand for new housing, Berlin adds. "Over the next six months, we're not out of this, but I think there's some tailwinds for our part of the world in particular that will put us in a pretty good position to begin to actually grow in the next year." 17. You think you got taxes? Peacock doesn't mince words about provincial taxes on people and businesses. "Top marginal tax rates are at a high for individuals," he says. "Effective marginal tax rates on investment in B.C. are among the highest, if not the highest, in Canada. So it's starting to shape up like the investment climate is pretty good for some industries, but it's pretty bad for land-based operators and maybe some manufacturers here in B.C." 18. To tax the rich, get creative In Hemingway's view, this is a good time to do something about growing economic disparity: "The public appetite for action in terms of reducing inequality, including taxing the rich, seems to be higher than at any point I can remember." He cites a recent national survey by Ottawa-based Abacus Data in which 89 percent of respondents backed a 1-percent tax on the wealthiest Canadians to support pandemic recovery. At the provincial level, Hemingway sees a big opportunity to redistribute wealth by taxing prop- erty, whose value in B.C. has climbed by more than $1 trillion since the mid-2000s. Today, property tax applies to individual parcels of land. "But now that we have the beneficial ownership registry online, what you could do is apply the tax to the total holdings of any specific landowner above a given value," Heming- way says, suggesting that the provincial government use different brackets. 19. Pick up the pace on public transit Post-pandemic and in an era of rising inequality and climate change, there's a growing recognition the government must play a bigger role in several areas, Hemingway says. For example, B.C. needs to "mas- sively and much more quickly invest in public trans- portation," he argues. "We've been moving at a pace of maybe building about one SkyTrain line a decade in Metro Vancouver. If we're serious about this climate thing and we're also serious about city-building, we need to be looking at ramping that up considerably." 20. Retail reconfiguration ahead? At Central 1, Yu expects a B.C. retail slowdown this year, for two reasons. "No. 1, the sales numbers are being boosted by higher prices," he says. The second factor: as the economy fully reopens, much of the demand related to housing should rotate back into services. "So we'll see that in the GDP, but the retail numbers will suffer." During COVID, the property class that Wells Fargo has been most worried about is retail, Davis says. It remains a concern as shoppers keep moving online. Davis flags what he calls the barbell effect: big-box stores like Costco and Walmart are doing well, along "The public appetite for action in terms of reducing inequality, including taxing the rich, seems to be higher than at any point I can remember" –ALEX HEMINGWAY, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives 2022 B U S I N E S S and E C O N O M I C