economy
01. economy Not surprisingly, early incremental (re-)gains in employment in Metro Vancouver have been replaced with much slower growth. Still, it is growth nonetheless.
EMPLOYMENT: UP, UP...HOORAY
Twelve months into the pandemic, and employment across Canada remains below pre-Covid-19 levels. The fact that such a statement likely elicits nary an eyebrow raise is a testament to the reality of the past year: we have somehow become comfortable with the notion that we have been going through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. What’s more, we implicitly agreed to do it to ourselves. Our collective ambivalence towards our economic circumstances—they are painful but temporary, afterall—likely stems from two sources. One, there were no great imbalances in our economy heading into this Great Suppression: unemployment was low, but not so low as to overheat the labour market; interest rates were low, but not so low as to over-encourage risky borrowing; and real GDP was plugging along at below- historical averages. Two, fiscal and monetary policies were enacted from the outset of the pandemic to bridge the gap from “here” (pre-Covid-19) to “there” (post-Covid-19).
In other words, more-than-adequate financial reinforcements flooded in. Furthermore, jobs in Canada’s major metros have continued to recover after bottoming out in May, although the pace of recovery has varied somewhat over the past 6 months. In Greater Toronto, for example, employment was only 2% below pre-Covid-19 levels in September, but is now 6% lower. In Greater Montreal, employment was 2% below its pre- Covid-19 level in August and, after a slide backwards, is again only 2% below February 2020. In comparison, Metro Vancouver has been the little engine that could, with a bigger crater carved into the region’s employment landscape early on and a slower initial recovery being replaced by continued job growth that now has employment only 2% below February 2020’s level. It’s good news for the local economy and housing market, but there is still a ways to go.
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