Voting With Their Feet: Jock Finlayson on Why People Are Leaving B.C.

For the first time in a century and a half, B.C.'s population is shrinking.

That's the starting point for the latest Conversations That Matter, where host Stuart McNish sits down with ICBA Chief Economist Jock Finlayson and Rennie chief economist Ryan Berlin to work through a question the province keeps avoiding: why are people leaving?

The numbers behind the conversation come from Building B.C. Right, the report Jock wrote with economist Ken Peacock. Their finding is blunt. "GDP, per capita income, private sector investment, export performance, private sector employment creation, and the state of the provincial finances have all lost ground in recent years," the report says. "The picture is sobering."

And this isn't something Washington did to us. The report points to "home grown challenges rooted in provincial policies that have raised costs, fostered uncertainty, discouraged investment, expanded the public sector at an unsustainable pace, and weakened the government's fiscal position in a dramatic way." Tariffs get the blame in Victoria, but as the report notes, "the data clearly shows the province's economic underperformance predates the current tariff environment by several years."

People notice. More than 40,000 of them have left.

"Add it all up and people are voting with their feet," Berlin says. "They're leaving and, for the first time in 151 years, the population of the province of B.C. is decreasing."

For construction, a shrinking population is not an abstraction. It is fewer housing starts, fewer workers, fewer projects and a smaller tax base to pay for the infrastructure we still need.