British Columbia Industries Are Still Climbing Out Of The Recession

How are industries in British Columbia doing in the aftereffects of the Great Recession? It’s been about four years, now, since the worst of the 2008-2009 recession rolled through the Canadian economy. While the economic downturn was never as severe in Canada as it was in the USA, there’s still no denying the profound impact it had on the Canadian economic climate. But the question is – how have we recovered? What industries are now ahead of where they were in 2008, and which have slid further into job losses?

To get a sense of how various industries have, or haven’t, recovered from the recession, we focused in on British Columbia. While Ontario was, and remains, the largest provincial economy in Canada, British Columbia’s technology sectors have helped its job market grow by over 17% in the last decade, adding almost 300,000 jobs between 2003 and 2013. That’s a significantly higher growth rate than the Canadian average, and well above Ontario, which is surprisingly behind the Canadian trend at only 10.5%. 

Even a quick look at that growth chart shows the negative effects of the 2008 recession, as all three curves dip severely from 2008 to 2009. All three, however, appear to have essentially returned to or slightly surpassed 2008 levels as of 2012. Taken at face value, one might think that every industry had recovered from the negative effects of the recession.

Manufacturing, Logging May Be Down For The Count

A closer look at the actual data for industries in British Columbia shows that, at least on the Pacific coast, that wasn’t the case. Not that there aren’t a number of industries that have made a significant comeback since 2009, but a number of previously central industries seem to have been permanently crippled by the 2009 downturn. One of the major trends that the data shows is the severe downturn in manufacturing industries province-wide. Incredibly, industry growth has flatlined since 2009; while the manufacturing industry lost 13% of its jobs between 2008 and 2009, growth since then has been negligible.

A few industries have continued to bleed out; the printing industry lost 12% in the first year and another 10% since then, while wood product manufacturing has declined another 3% since losing a catastrophic 20%, or over 6,000 jobs, between 2008 and 2009. While beverage and tobacco manufacturing has staged an impressive recovery, and chemical manufacturing is also slightly ahead of its 2008 starting point, the BC manufacturing industry seems to be in serious trouble. Here are statistics comparing the different manufacturing industries in 2008, 2009, and 2012:

As a point of comparison, it’s interesting to note that losing 13% of its jobs in a year makes the decline of BC manufacturing even worse than the much-heralded decline of US manufacturing. Over that same 2008-2009 period, the US manufacturing sector lost 12% of its jobs. However, BC’s sufferings in the recession are still not as bad as some US states. Eight states lost more than 13% of their manufacturing jobs that year, including Indiana, Ohio, and the biggest loser, Michigan – which shed 19% of its enormous manufacturing sector.

The steady death of wood product manufacturing in BC points us to the other major casualty of the recession: logging. At its height in 2004, the British Columbia forestry and logging industry accounted for almost 18,000 jobs, not to mention all the ancillary industries connected to its success. That made BC account for more than a third of all the forestry jobs in Canada. But after 2004, for a number of reasons, forestry went into sharp decline nationwide, mostly because of BC’s precipitously crashing logging industry. By 2009, BC had lost almost half its forestry jobs, down to a low of just 9,484 jobs. As this chart of its progress compared with the nation’s shows, BC’s forestry industry has made a slight comeback. Still, its decline since 2004 is nothing short of catastrophic.

Back From The Grave

Before it starts looking like the BC economy is doomed, though, there are a number of industries that really have rebounded well from the 2009 downturn. After all, there’s a reason that the provincial job market as a whole has grown 3% since ’09, and is even marginally ahead of where it was in ’08. Here are the industries that have grown the most since 2008:

Some highlights: to no one’s surprise, the oil and gas boom has spilled over to BC’s economy, but it actually hasn’t added enough jobs to make the top of the chart. Rather, the highest percentage change among occupations that gained over 1,000 jobs was its cousin, mining and quarrying — up 2,462 jobs, a 27% increase from 2008. The biggest gainer in numbers was nursing — always a major player in the BC economy — which, along with residential care facilities, added 6,681 jobs for a 16% gain over 2008.

A number of these industries actually never noticed the recession at all. Farming, for example, added jobs in every year since 2008, up 21% in the last five years. So did hospitals, up 9%, and local, municipal and regional administration, up 5%. While one can’t help worrying about public sector industries (hospitals, government, etc.) that somehow find money to hire new employees in the midst of a recession, there are more than enough private sector industries making significant strides to say with confidence that British Columbia is on its way to economic health — even if the new economy is reliant on a new set of industries quite different from the British Columbia of ten years ago.

Data for this post came from the 2013.1 Beta dataset in Analyst for Canada, EMSI’s web-based labour market tool. Follow us on Twitter @desktopecon. Email Fraser Martens if you have any questions or comments, or would like to see further data.