ISTOCK JULY/AUGUST 2017 BCBUSINESS 71
ritish Columbia entered 2016 with
condence and never looked back.
The Urban Land Institute's B.C.
chapter helped set the tone with a
November 2015 gathering in Van-
couver, where speaker Andy War-
ren of PwC told a crowd of local
real estate developers and urban planners
that business optimism had reached levels
not seen since before the 2008‡09 global
nancial crisis.
Bullishness as a prelude to meltdown
doesn't o‰er much comfort, but B.C.'s econ-
omy was on the money last year. It soared
above Alberta's woes to outpace every
other province in job creation and serve as
a beacon of openness and stability when—
appropriately for Year of the Monkey—
Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency.
But if one story dominated the economic
chatter in B.C. through 2016, it was high
housing costs and how government e‰orts
to address them would play out. There was
plenty of action, between crackdowns on
so-called shadow "ipping and increases in
the property transfer tax on homes worth
$2 million and up, plus August's snap impo-
sition of a foreign buyer tax on residential
purchases in Metro Vancouver. Observ-
ers feared that housing starts would stall
(they didn't) and that foreign investment
and international workers, facing another
obstacle to buying already expensive local
real estate, would be scared o‰.
But the workers kept coming. B.C.
posted a net increase of almost 62,000
residents in 2016, the biggest percentage
gain since 2009—even as residential real
estate purchases, at least those from China,
cooled. Meanwhile, slower growth in China
and many other parts of the world let B.C.
keep shining brightly in relative terms.
And therein lies the key to the success
the province's biggest companies enjoyed
in 2016: despite e‰orts to hitch B.C.'s wagon
to the galloping economies of other coun-
tries, B.C. hauled those nations forward by
delivering the resources they needed and
providing a destination for their goods and
services. Gross domestic product growth
was estimated at 2.9 per cent (Business
Council of British Columbia), 3.3 per cent
(Royal Bank of Canada) or 3.5 per cent
(Central 1 Credit Union); in any case, it led
the rest of Canada as natural resource and
technoloŸy players saw their fortunes rise.
AS THE BAR FOR
ADMISSION TO THE
TOP 100 REACHED A
NEW HIGH, B.C.'S
BIGGEST COMPANIES
BY REVENUE
SHOWCASED THE
PROVINCE'S BROAD-
BASED ECONOMIC
STRENGTH IN 2016
continued on page 78
