3/26/05

B.C. expecting 36,000 new arrivals

Influx of interprovincial and international migrants is biggest in five years: BC Stats

BY DERRICK PENNER
VANCOUVER SUN

British Columbia will see its biggest inflow of interprovincial and international migration in the last five years during 2005, with about 36,000 new arrivals expected, according to figures from BC Stats.

"I wasn't surprised by them," Finance Minister Colin Hansen said on learning of the numbers. "We expect this trend to continue."

He added that what the numbers indicate is that government policies aimed at boosting the economy are working and "B.C. is once again a destination and is starting to attract a lot of those young British Columbians who left 10 years ago."

"More importantly, these numbers show fewer British Columbians are, in fact, leaving British Columbia, because they are able to find jobs and opportunities here," Hansen said.

BC Stats is estimating that interprovincial migration - the number of people moving to B.C. from elsewhere in Canada in excess of the number who leave - will hit 9,000 this year, which will make it the third year in a row in which B.C. has posted positive results.

Some 7,080 more people moved to B.C. than left in 2004, a steep increase from the net interprovincial migration of 3,747 B.C. experienced in 2003.

The positive numbers still do not match the heyday of interprovincial migration from the late 1980s to mid 1990s, which peaked in 1992, when 39,578 more people moved to B.C. from other provinces, but it beats the doldrums of the 1998 to 2002 period, when some 44,000 more people moved to other provinces than moved in.

BC Stats estimates immigration will add up to 27,000 new residents this year.

Immigration to B.C. peaked in 1994, when almost 50,000 new Canadians landed in the province at the height of the last Asian economic boom and anxiety over the handover of Hong Kong to mainland China.

B.C. also saw a population boost of 34,449 from interprovincial migration that year, making the total population growth 77,000.

David Baxter, director of the Urban Futures Institute, an economics and population research firm, said B.C. is definitely on a roll.

"This is not a boom projection, this is in part a recovery projection," Baxter said of BC Stats' estimates, but he expects it will continue, "so long as the commodity demand from Asia continues to be strong; as long as we continue to be optimistic in B.C."

Baxter outlined factors that "pull" population to a province, or "push" it away. He said B.C. had tremendous interprovincial "pull" during the early 1990s during a period of Asian economic expansion, while recessions in Ontario "pushed" residents away.

However, he said that balance shifted in the late 1990s. Asia slid into a recession, and B.C. followed.

Baxter said that created a "push" from B.C., while Ontario and Alberta's booming economies exerted tremendous "pull."

He added that the trend started to slow and swing back into B.C.'s favour around 2000. Baxter said B.C.'s booming oil and gas industry, construction sector and sense of optimism surrounding the 2010 Olympics are "all coming together [to give] us that pull back."

"But because Alberta is strong, we don't get that huge pull we saw in the early '90s."

B.C. did gain residents from Alberta in 2004, with some 205 more people moving to west of the Rocky Mountains than the other way in the last quarter of 2004.

Hansen said economic signs for B.C.'s future look positive. He added that most of B.C.'s incredible job growth in recent years has come from the construction sector, which has been driven by population growth.

As population growth continues on its upward trend, Hansen said, the economic strength should continue. He also believes that gains in other sectors, such as technology, should help B.C. weather economic volatility somewhat better.

Hansen said that in the past week, both the Toronto Dominion and Royal banks forecast that B.C. will be one of Canada's economic leaders and Statistics Canada shows B.C. still having the highest job growth rate in the country.