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/1490198
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023 BCBUSINESS.CA 37 LUXE VALLEY DIGITAL want to enjoy a continuation of the services that they need, then those young people have to come work in those areas," he says. To that end, Parksville is working to ensure that it can provide the kinds of ame- nities that attract and retain families. But, says Burden, the city also needs to raise the profile of what it already has to offer. One of the ways the chamber is trying to accom- plish this is through a new website that touts the economic and lifestyle advantages of the area with an eye to luring business, invest- ment and working-age residents. "We want to be able to get the word out a little broader, to bring people here with their entrepre- neurial skills and ideas," Burden explains. Jordan Porth of Happy Jack's is optimis- tic about Parksville's economic trajectory, and says the community has much to offer any prospective residents or entrepreneurs. "The city has a desire to attract families, has new developments going up all over, vast new neighbourhoods, a new pool complex on the horizon and a climate and location that is second to none," he says. "We have personally lived in the Lower Mainland, the Okanagan [and] Northern B.C., and no place comes close to living here." ALWAYS SUNNY IN SUMMERLAND Summerland—ranking in the top 10 for the first time since being added to our annual list in 2019—has become one of the top per- formers in the B.C. Interior, and is a prime example of the dynamism, creativity and economic vibrancy shown by B.C.'s smaller cities. Stable household finances, robust residential sales, solid job growth, low unemployment and a better-than-most (albeit barely satisfactory) rental vacancy rate all helped buoy the community's score. "We certainly are small in scale, so we can get a little lost amongst our neighbours, being smushed between Penticton and Kelowna," admits Kristin Parsons, interim executive director and business advisor at the Summerland Chamber of Commerce. But Parsons believes the community is at a turning point: "The next five years are going to see Summerland come out on its own and no longer be the little sister." In recent years, Summerland has repo- sitioned its economic focus to turn a major constraint into an economic opportunity. Recognizing that 80 percent of its land is within the province's restrictive Agri- cultural Land Reserve, or ALR, the com- munity has decided to lean into those agrarian roots. "Agritourism opportuni- ties and accommodations development is a huge opportunity for our community to differentiate ourselves," Parsons explains. Taking advantage of that opportunity has included encouragement for local agricul- tural businesses to add tours, onsite accom- modations and hands-on experiences to their operations, and to provide visitors with a chance to sample local products straight from the farm. O'Kana Guest Ranch, which offers yurt-based "glamping," is just one example of this new breed of tourism enter- prise that Parsons points to—adding that such unique accommodations also offer visi- tors a home base from which to access more experiences in the region. Okanagan Crush Pad is among the Sum- merland businesses that are fully embracing agritourism ambition. Coletta and Lornie Just so you know: • Our ranking only includes cities of 10,000 or more permanent residents. • We excluded bedroom communities such as Lake Country, Oak Bay and West Vancouver, which may offer a high quality of life but have relatively small job markets. • Langley and North Vancouver 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 the best data has its limitations. To produce municipal-level population growth numbers, for example, Environics Analytics used regional-level estimates from Statistics Canada to make 2022 projections. • Job numbers and unemployment rates come from StatCan's monthly Labour Force Survey and only present figures for B.C.'s eight economic regions and four largest census metropolitan areas for the first three quarters of 2022. Similarly, monthly housing starts figures provided by Canada Mortgage 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 2022. • Annual rental vacancy rates provided by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. represent the "primary rental market" or private apartment unit market only. However, the primary rental market rates for three cities on our list were not reported due to unreliable or insufficient data. Therefore, estimates were derived for Sooke from regional figures reported for the Capital Region; for Whistler from values provided for the Whistler Housing Authority's stock of workforce rental housing; and for Sechelt from an analysis of its total rental stock, advertised rental listings and the performance of its regional peers. £ COUNTRY STRONG By cracking the list's top 10, Summerland exhibits the potential of B.C.'s smaller cities