The world's economies are in a state of flux, and B.C.and this region in particular stands among the churning market forces, Minister of Jobs, Tourism and Innovation Pat Bell told the Chamber of Commerce on Monday.
Bell, the MLA for Prince George-Mackenzie, said it's up to area businesses to work within those market forces and find ways to exploit them.
"It can be a good news story, or it can be a bad news story," Bell cautioned. "We have positioned ourselves very well to take advantage of the opportunities...We are in a position in northern B.C. to take advantage of this economic shift going on in the world."
The shift is rooted in Europe's angst over some nations' cash and credit crunch within the European Union, the ballooning United States debt and deficit, and both China and India continuing to surge economically. The typical superpowers of manufacturing, financing and consumerism are changing addresses, Bell explained, and northern B.C. is linked to all the players.
He said Prince George is embracing the change, even if the public wasn't fully conscious of the details. The unemployment rate is a mere 6.6 per cent; and more local residents had a job last month, than at any other time in city history. While the overall number of jobs in B.C. declined over the summer, he said, Prince George was up. Building permits were also up in the area.
But the tender U.S. economy - bashed by the global economic crash of 2008 - was still on shaky ground while the economies of China and India were still finding their way upwards. That uncertainty is less so at the local level. The reasons, he said, were infrastructure preparations like the Port of Prince Rupert and the inland container port in Prince George, the upgrades to the Prince George Airport, and the highway expansions underway on the Cariboo Connector.
"It is important that we don't get lazy," he told the audience of about 100 chamber members during a Monday luncheon at the Signature Sandman. "We have been buffered [from the economic crisis] compared to the United States and other parts of Canada."
In addition to the infrastructure investments, he said, the provincial government can help by maintaining an economic plan that has kept its AAA credit rating, despite the global economic challenges.
"We are going to focus on first-dollar industries where you are bringing in money from outside the local economy," he said. That included industries like agriculture, tourism, mining, forestry, natural gas, and even foreign students "which outstrips the film industry" for injecting new money into the province.
The other role of government, he said, is permits and regulations and attention was being paid to keeping the public's safeguards but de-cluttering the permitting process holding business and industry back.
"We have to go out an earn it," he said. "We can compete for that capital or we can let it pass us by. If it doesn't come here, it will go somewhere else and it will be gone forever. I'm not as worried right now about the United States's ability to compete but the Australian economy didn't have a blip [during the '08 crisis] and they are very good at going out there, competing in the open market for dollars into their economy."
