Natural Resource Industries Still Critical to B.C.’s Economic Success
British Columbia is a province with an increasingly urban-based population whose economic success has historically been tied to the efficient extraction, processing and exporting of commodities. In 2011, approximately four-fifths of B.C.’s international merchandise exports consisted of goods produced by the forestry, energy, mining and agri-food industries taken as a group. This proportion is little changed from ten years ago, and it is substantially higher than the share of resource-based goods in overall Canadian merchandise exports.
Today’s heavily urban population is poorly equipped to understand the realities of B.C.’s industrial and economic base. Elected officials, media commentators, and the province’s cultural and intellectual elites disproportionately hail from the comfy precincts of the Lower Mainland and Greater Victoria. Yet urban British Columbia is not where the export wealth that does so much to underpin our standard of living is mainly generated. Read more