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/1514012
40 To p : i S t o c k / p a s e v e n BC BU S I N E S S .C A F E B R U A R Y 2 0 24 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 Envi- ronics 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, Envi- ronics Analytics used regional-level estimates from Statistics Canada to make 2023 projections. Job numbers and unemployment rates come from StatCan's monthly Labour Force Survey and only pres- ent figures for B.C.'s eight economic regions and four largest census metropolitan areas for the first three quarters of 2023. 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 2023. 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 five cities on our list were not reported due to unreliable or insufficient data. Therefore, estimates were derived for Sooke and Sidney from regional figures reported for the Capital Region; for Whistler from values provided for the Whistler Housing Authority's stock of workforce rental housing; for Sechelt from an analysis of its regional peers; and for Pitt Meadows from broader area figures provided for Pitt Meadows- Maple Ridge. HollyNorth Production Supplies is one of those businesses. It has been provid- ing lighting, special effects machines, cos- tumes and props to the film industry for over 25 years. "November 1, 1998, was our first offi- cial day of business," reflects Mike Kaerne, HollyNorth's president and CEO. "I chose Burnaby because, at that time, where I am at 1st and Boundary was kind of central to the existing studios—Bridge Studios, Van- couver Film Studios, North Shore Studios." And even as the film industry has grown over time to include new studio spaces in farther-flung Langley and Maple Ridge, HollyNorth has continued to benefit from Burnaby's central location and the opera- tion's convenient highway access. Of course, with a bevy of recently completed and under-development studio spaces in Burnaby, including Lake City Studios— poised to become Canada's largest film and TV studio complex upon opening in 2025—Burnaby is slated to remain the heart of Metro Vancouver's film industry for the foreseeable future. However, the recent strikes caused a major slowdown for the industry over 2023. "It [was] a tough six months, that's for sure," says Kaerne. "[Staff ] went to half days and as it got worse and worse, the production shut down and then when the actors went on strike, it just dwindled down to a small percentage of what we nor- mally do, so I couldn't afford to keep staff." For Kaerne, it has been reminiscent of past slowdowns, where it took time to rebuild staffing. "I remember back in 2008 when we went through a similar situation, about 80 percent of the industry returned right away," explains Kaerne. "But then another 10 percent took a little bit of time because they found other jobs and they have to put in notice and things like that, and then probably 10 or 12 percent we just lost to other industries." Getting staffing back to pre-strike lev- els could prove extra challenging this time around as Kaerne highlights a recur- ring theme: "Finding staff is so hard these days, not only for us but for pretty well everybody." Like much of the province, labour shortages have been a citywide issue for " I chose Burnaby because, at that time, where I am at 1st and Boundary was kind of central to the existing studios—Bridge Studios, Vancouver Film Studios, North Shore Studios." —Mike Kaerne, HollyNorth's president and CEO