Gone are the days when Alberta was riding high...so high that a fall was inevitable. The province's employers used to pay high bonuses to entice employees to move to Alberta to take up even the most low-skilled jobs, and now they cannot create enough employment to make a dent in their unemployment rate. The boom and bust economy is back. There are better opportunities elsewhere in Canada.
Alberta lags behind Sask., B.C. in attracting and keeping migrants
Alberta lags behind Sask., B.C. in attracting and keeping migrants
Kevin Libin, National Post · Friday, Jul. 2, 2010
There would seem not much for Alberta to cheer about in Statistics Canada’s latest provincial migration figures released this week.
For the first three months of 2010, the province that not long ago watched fleets of worker-filled Greyhound buses pour over its borders managed to add just 312 new people to its ranks. Just three new people moving from other provinces a day, on average? That’s less than 2% of the inflow of Canadians the province was seeing back in the months before Ed Stelmach became Premier.
Yet, for the provincial government, that is what passes these days for good news. After the last half of 2009, in which the province hemorrhaged 5,300 more people than it gained — the province’s first shrinkage since the early ’90s — a virtual flattening of population growth could be a sign that Alberta’s mojo is coming back, says Bart Johnson, a spokesman for the province’s Finance Ministry.
“We see it as a positive sign,” he says. “Even though it’s a very modest increase of 312, that’s a reversal of the previous two quarters. And it’s something that we expected to see and we expect it’s going to continue to grow as we go through the year.”
It’s hard to blame the provincial Progressive Conservative government for embracing optimism. Things, finally, have started turning Mr. Stelmach’s way in recent months — or, at least, it seems they’ve stopped going downhill. So much so that the buzz in the legislature is that he may call a fall election, a scant two-and-a-half years after the last. After all, satisfying uniquely low economic expectations might suffice for the quarter or three following severe global recession; soon, Albertans may demand much more.
Last week, for instance, the government crowed that it had nearly demolished the projections for the 2009-10 deficit, overspending by just $1-billion instead of the nearly $5-billion expected. The reason, however, was due to higher-than-expected royalty revenues from the oil sands, and not more careful fiscal management in Edmonton, where spending continues to swell. This year’s projected deficit is still heading toward breaking red-ink records, unless serendipity again intervenes.
A June PricewaterhouseCoopers report, prepared for the government, warns meanwhile that the province’s long-term future as a strong economic competitor may be in doubt, given that it lags other provinces in measurements of access to venture capital, innovation, productivity growth and university graduates.
It would be taking things too far to argue that Alberta’s three mediocre quarters of population growth are a sign malaise has set into a province once seen as Canada’s most robust. Certainly the global recession challenged Alberta, though no province escaped it, including Western economies as heavily dependent on exports as this one.
“During the downturn, we did worse economically, relative to Saskatchewan and relative to British Columbia, and so that really affected migration,” says Frank Atkins, a University of Calgary economist. “The reason for all of this was here in Alberta, the downturn was exacerbated by the [government’s] royalty increases. They came in right at the worst time possible.” Jobs dried up: as of April, 2010, Alberta’s 7.4% unemployment rate was worse than both B.C.’s and Saskatchewan’s. “People just moved out,” Mr. Atkins says.
And it’s the interprovincial migration numbers next door that Albertans might worry over most: as Alberta slipped, its neighbours only grew stronger. While Alberta suffered a loss of more than 5,000 residents since last summer, Saskatchewan saw more than 2,800 Canadians relocate there, and B.C. more than 7,400. In the first quarter of this year alone, Alberta’s neighbours added at least four times its 300 interprovincial migrants — many of them families leaving Alberta and choosing to resettle in Saskatchewan or B.C. According to Statistics Canada data, this year, nearly 10,000 Albertans moved one province over: 3,205 to Saskatchewan, 6,565 to B.C. After decades of watching her best and brightest decamp for Alberta’s unmatched opportunities, Saskatchewan has seen only consistent net population gains every single quarter since 2007.
Ever since former premier Ralph Klein set out to streamline its economic profile in the mid-1990s, cutting taxes and spending, then eventually paying off the province’s debt, Alberta had been the place where Saskatchewanians and British Columbians flocked for opportunity. In the last few years, that competition for investment and labour has heated up dramatically: hundreds of millions of capital dollars fled to oil and gas projects both East and West after Mr. Stelmach dramatically jacked up energy royalties on his most indispensable sector, as both B.C. and Saskatchewan smilingly promised investors a lower and more stable government levy. And both provinces have in recent years sharpened their tax offerings for investors.
“The regional economy has become much more balanced in the last few years, and so what used to be a steady drain of people … into Alberta has changed dramatically,” says Roger Gibbins, president and chief executive of the Canada West Foundation. “We’re seeing the exodus of people out of Alberta into Saskatchewan. It’s almost like it’s payback time.”
For years, Alberta had been the economic model other Western provinces longed to emulate. But the more they’ve improved, it seems, the harder it has been for Alberta to maintain its lead.
There will be many more economic indicators to sift through as the economic recovery unfolds. But when a government appears relieved that its flatlining population numbers only look lousy next to its neighbours, because they could always be worse, it may be a sign that Western Canada’s economic future no longer belongs exclusively to Alberta.Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Alberta+lags+behind+Sask+attracting+keeping+migrants/3230019/story.html#ixzz0sceRRzlD
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