BCBUSINESS.CA
SOURCES: STATISTICS
CANADA, B.C. ECONOMIC
ACCOUNTS. INCLUDES A
PRELIMINARY ESTIMATE
FOR 2016
NOVEMBER 2017 BCBUSINESS 17
T H E M O N T H LY I N F O R M E R
tmı
"I tell everybody I know, we
produce half per capita the
number of engineers that our
peer provinces do" –p.20
N O V E M B E R 2 0 17
INSIDE
Beaty vs. Björk ... Robots on the move ... Digging into mining ... Impairment policies ... + more
PARTY GUYS
NDP premiers then
and now: Mike
Harcourt, Glen
Clark, John Horgan
T
hey're back.
The dreaded New
Democrats, who former
premier Christy Clark warned
would ransack the provincial
treasury and crash the economy,
have seized the reins of govern-
ment, with an electoral minority
and the support of a perhaps
more frightening Green Party, led
by climate Cassandra (and Nobel
Peace Prize–winning scientist)
trade tweets from the U.S.
president. Still, we remember the
NDP's 1990s tenure: Christy Clark
calls it "the lost decade." Some
of us recall a harder-left turn in
the 1970s, when the ˆrst
NDP pre-
mier, Dave Barrett, implemented
a radical agenda of government
intervention—everything from
creating an Agricultural Land
Reserve to nationalizing auto
insurance. Surely the business
community must quake at the
NDP's return.
But again, not—at least
according to the president and
COO of the Jim Pattison Group,
the largest privately held com-
pany in Canada and one of B.C.'s
No Sudden Moves
POLITICS
WERE THE
1990S
REALLY
A LOST DECADE
FOR B.C.?
Andrew Weaver. After several
months of
NDP rule, it's amazing
that corporate Vancouver still
seems so well dressed, consider-
ing the gnashing of teeth and
tearing of clothes that must be
occurring behind closed doors.
And yet not. The economy,
apparently indi–erent to swings
in provincial governance, re -
sponds instead to global commod-
ity prices and to ill-considered
How will business fare with the NDP back at the helm?
Just fine, senior politicos say, as long as everyone stays
calm and communicative
by Richard Littlemore
Average real GDP
growth
1990-99:
2.5%
2000-09:
2.59%
2010-16:
3%
