Unemployment in B.C. went up very slightly in December, but it remains at a historically low level.
The unemployment rate last month was 5.6 per cent, which is below the Canadian average of 5.8 per cent. British Columbia has been doing better than Canada by most standards for years now, and it’s certainly well below the 10-year average, which is 6.5 per cent.
Not bad for a province, and a country, that are still getting out from under the shadow of an economically devastating pandemic, not to mention still dealing with the trailing edge of a historic spike in inflation.
Looked at historically, the picture is even rosier – in the 1980s, unemployment in B.C. averaged 11.84 per cent, and in the 1990s it was 8.87 per cent.
Our economy used to be much more boom-and-bust, driven by the international markets for lumber, minerals, and seafood. When things were good, there were jobs at the mill or the mines, and in the towns that served those industries. When things were bad, they were really bad.
British Columbians are now as likely to work on a film set as in a lumber mill, more likely to make video games than to catch salmon.
But even as jobs have become more plentiful, they’ve become a bigger part of our personal safety net.
It’s almost impossible now to pay all of a household’s bills on a single person’s income. Both rents and mortgages are now ludicrously higher than they were a generation or two ago. We’re a better educated workforce, but the cost of that education and the time it takes to put in those extra years in school counts against your future earnings, too.
Over the last decade, we’ve come much closer to being a full-employment economy. But the price of that has been that we need our jobs. We can’t do without them. Too many of us are living paycheck to paycheck.
That leads to a lot of anxiety. Even those who are doing pretty well get irked, even afraid, when they see the cost of groceries zipping upwards with the speed of a Roman candle. Those who aren’t doing so well – those on income assistance because they can’t work, and seniors on fixed incomes – can’t do much about it at all.
Jobs are great, but jobs alone can’t be the answer to every economic challenge we face. Not even full employment will fix everything.
– M.C.