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While we struggle to balance the health of our national economy with environmental concerns, we risk throwing the resource industry baby out with the bathwater, to the detriment of our current quality of life.
Kevin Milligan, a UBC professor of economics wrote in a recent Globe and Mail article that “nothing has contributed more than natural resources to buttressing the Canadian middle class against the rapidly changing global economy of the 21st century.”
He stressed that “While opinions on pipelines are flowing around Canada more quickly than the oil, the importance of the resource industry to middle-class incomes can be seen in the earnings of the average worker across the nation.”
His research showed that between 2000 and 2015, Canadian workers’ earnings, in real terms, rose by just six per cent, or less than half a per cent a year. However, over that same period Alberta saw earnings growth of 27 per cent and Saskatchewan topped 44 per cent, while Quebec only saw growth of six per cent and Ontario suffered a loss of four per cent. It’s doubtful that our Maritime provinces managed any better.
Milligan, with some justification, concludes that without income derived from the resource sector, issues such as income inequality and the well-being of the Canadian middle class would be much worse than we’ve experienced to-date.
The impact of natural resources is not just on those who work directly for natural resource companies. There are large wage-spillovers to others working in resource communities in construction, transportation and services.
Moreover, resource-derived tax dollars fill up government coffers to provide generous compensation in middle-class public-sector jobs such as in nursing, education, police and emergency services, and the civil service in general. And what’s more, these benefits don’t only help provinces with plentiful resources.
As we in the Maritimes well know, the federal equalization formula dips into the federal purse to top up provinces without comparable resource revenue streams. In Nova Scotia’s case, 2018-2019 will see $1.9 billion of incoming federal transfers, from the three resource-rich “have” provinces in Western Canada; almost $6,000 per Nova Scotia family annually,
Going forward, a healthy and growing national resource industry will be crucial, not only to our province’s economic future, but particularly to rural, less populated regions such as Cumberland County.
New developments in biotechnology, information and communications technology, aerospace/defense, and oceans related R&D, may well produce growth in jobs and industry; but they will likely be centred in and around the Halifax Regional Municipality.
This is because new entrants in these high technology fields are attracted to large population areas where lots of needed technical and research expertise exists …. and workers enjoy a greater choice of potential employers and opportunities for career development with job mobility opportunities from one employer to another, just down the road, as it were. This is how it is in major hi-tech centres such as Silicon Valley, and Canadian centres like Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, Vancouver and so on…and this is how it will likely be in the HRM region.
Fortunately for Cumberland County we have a number of future resource industry opportunities to exploit, including agriculture and agri-food industries, along with fisheries and forestry. And let’s not overlook the tourism industry in our region, which has the potential to be one of our top natural resources, and a stimulus for growth in business enterprises catering to this sector.
Sustainable energy is another opportunity area, given the ground-breaking work underway on geothermal energy sources in the Springhill project, and the tidal power initiative located on our Fundy shoreline. We will also benefit from our early investments made in wind power, while other municipalities, swayed by misguided objections, took a pass and are living to regret it.
Alan Walter is a retired professional engineer living in Oxford. He was born in Wales and worked in Halifax. He spends much of his time in Oxford, where he operates a small farm. He can be reached at [email protected].
