The latest job numbers from Statistics Canada for June show slightly increased hiring in B.C. overall, but also reveal major remaining demographic and regional disparities, including stubbornly high youth unemployment and rising joblessness in the Interior.
“People are maybe tired of hearing about tariffs, but they have an impact,” said Ravi Kahlon, B.C.’s jobs minister. “They have an impact directly, but also it creates uncertainty, which is a real challenge.”
B.C.’s unemployment rate dropped slightly by 0.3 percentage points to 6.5 per cent from May to June. The province’s rate now matches the overall federal figure.
But young people are still having much more difficulty finding jobs than core-aged British Columbians, and people in places such as Kelowna still have a much tougher time than those in other parts of B.C., such as Victoria.
B.C. Conservative Economic Development critic Gavin Dew called it a “tale of two cities.”
“Victoria continues to have very low unemployment, and that’s no surprise given how much this government has grown the public sector,” Dew said. “Meanwhile, Kelowna, which is primarily a private-sector economy driven by small business and entrepreneurship, continues to have high unemployment.”
Youth unemployment, defined as people aged 15 to 24, decreased from 15.3 per cent to 12.9 per cent in June compared with May — but it remains nearly double that of the general population. And so does the unemployment rate in Kelowna, which rose in June to 12.7 per cent from 12.1 per cent in May.
Dew, who represents Kelowna-Mission, says the situation in the city stems from a drop in home construction and a slumping tourism sector. He says many people moved to Kelowna for construction jobs when house-building was booming, but are now unemployed.
“That housing sector has cooled really significantly,” Dew said. “You have a lot of people who are moving or moving back to Alberta and other places where the opportunities are.”
The construction sector shed 3,000 jobs provincewide in June.
Dew released a plan on Friday to tackle youth unemployment, proposing a tax credit for employers who hire people for their first jobs. He said the target is to create opportunities for the youngest workers, who he says are not seeing some of the employment gains of older youth.
“We have high school students who have submitted dozens, if not hundreds, of resumes trying to get that first summer job, trying to get that first foot on the rung of the ladder, and they’re just not getting an opportunity,” Dew said. “That’s really the dynamic that we want to try to address here.”
His plan would also include the province trying to wrest some control over the temporary foreign worker program from the federal government.
“Ottawa does not know best,” Dew said. “Ottawa does not know what’s happening in our communities.”
Kahlon questions how the province would pay for a tax credit.
“You can’t have it both ways,” he said. “You can’t continue to say that we should find ways to balance the budget, and at the same time call for all policies that will cost money.”
Kahlon plans to forge ahead with efforts to expand trades training instead.
“The thing that keeps me up at night right now is the significant number of projects that we actually see on the horizon and how we’re going to have the workforce to be able to take those employment opportunities,” he said.