economy
RE-VISITING THE DATA ON VISITOR COUNTS TO CANADA After 14 months of almost non-existent visitor flows to Canada, the border has recently been opening up. How far have we come?
As a small, open economy, Canada and its regions depend on international trade to help support and increase our collective prosperity. This applies not just to international transactions in products—the traditional import of processors from China and export of oil to the United States, for example—but also to the movement of people. In this case, we’re looking at visitors to Canada (tourists and business travellers). Visitor volumes are quite seasonal, so when considering monthly data like we are here, it’s useful to consider how numbers have changed over time for a specific month. (As the most recent data is from June 2022, we’ll look at June here.) During the depths of the pandemic, when Canada’s international borders were virtually closed, there were only 27,300 visitors to the Vancouver Coast and Mountains region (this includes both day-trips and multi-night stays
to the area covering the Lower Mainland, Sunshine Coast, and Vancouver Island) in June 2020 and just shy of 36,000 in June 2021. For context, there were 814,200 visitors in June 2019, and we averaged 696,900 visitors in each June between 2014 and 2018. Notably, visitors counts have risen fairly consistently on a monthly basis since June 2021, reaching 452,600 in June of this year— though this is still 44% below June 2019’s volume and 35% lower than the previous five-year June average. The good news is that visitor counts to this region seem to have room to run, and as they expand back toward historical norms in the coming year, we will reap the economic benefit of increased spending within our local economy, particularly in accommodation and food services, transportation, and recreation. We’ll just have to figure out a way to fill all those job vacancies…
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