High-profile economist Sherry Cooper believes things are looking up for Prince George.
"Pretty good a getting better," Cooper said Tuesday during a visit to the city when asked to assess the state of the local economy.
The reasons lie largely overseas in the form of the emerging Asian economies and Japan, where the earthquake and tsunami will soon spark a demand for Canadian building products.
"It's a real growth opportunity and it's already begun and it's only going to get bigger and bigger," said Cooper during an interview at the 15th and Central Bank of Montreal (BMO).
What's more, the U.S. economy is starting to turn around. The American housing market remains a question mark, she said, but believes it will stabilize this year.
"The overbuilding was just enormous and the kind of price increases, a la Vancouver-type price increases, was just not sustainable in the U.S.," said Cooper, the chief economist for the BMO Financial Group. "Even in Vancouver, things may well be out of hand and there could be some backsliding."
Starts on new homes in the U.S. are at roughly 500,000 a year, well down from the clip of two million during the peak in 2005. But Cooper noted household formations in the U.S. are expected to rise to about 1.2 million a year as homes become affordable, particularly for university graduates.
"The good news is that construction in the U.S. has fallen to such a low level that we will see the working off of the unsold inventory," she said. "Of course, there's still that big foreclosure bubble there and it hasn't all worked through through the pipeline."
A revival in the U.S. housing market will only add to the workload for area loggers and wood processors. Prince George's unemployment rate stood at a rock-bottom 5.7 per cent in March.
And as Prince George positions for an upturn, BMO has made moves to heighten its profile among local households and reach out to small businesses.
On the household front, BMO has launched two online services at no cost to clients:
- MoneyLogic, a no-cost online personal financial management tool that has drawn over 200,000 customers in just two months.
- SmartSteps for Parents, which offers online tools, advice, games and access to experts to help parents teach their kids about money.
"We want our customers to succeed and we want to help them out as they think through some of these complex things," said Frank Techar, BMO's president and chief executive officer for personal and commercial banking.
"For instance, making a payment on their mortgage twice a month instead of once a month so that they can minimize their interest costs and pay down their mortgage faster," Techar said.
For small businesses, BMO is in the process of hiring 150 small business banking specialists across Canada and one should be in place in Prince George by early next year.
"Small business is engine of growth for the economy in Canada and we've been a big supporter of that segment for a long period and we're continuing to do that," Techar said.
