There’s an article in the Vancouver Sun today filled with cheery forecasts for 2009, The title is “Good economic news: 2009 is only 12 months long“. Here are a few select quotes, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.
“The thing to keep in mind about 2009 is that it will end,” Jock Finlayson, executive vice-president of the Business Council of B.C. said in an interview, “and we’ll get on to 2010, which is going to be, hopefully, a much better year.”
..and Helmut Pastrick says:
“I think [2009] is just going to be one of the worst years we’ve seen in many years,” Pastrick said.
He said it will perhaps be worse than the province’s last recession in the early 1990s, though probably not as deep as the 1981-82 downturn.
On Housing:
The decline in provincial housing sales and new-housing construction starts will be the most noticeable impact of B.C.’s slowdown, Pastrick said.
TD Economics has pegged total sales in B.C. at 60,600 units for 2009, a decline of nine per cent from its estimate of 66,800 sales by the end of 2008, which is itself a 35-per-cent fall from 2007.
What about employment?
“I think we’ll see a rising tide of layoffs in industries like retail and tourism and housing,” Finlayson said.
TD Economics estimates that B.C. unemployment will average 5.3 per cent in 2009, up from an average of 4.5 per cent in 2008.
However, Pastrick said job losses in construction might become steeper later in 2009 as housing units already under construction come to completion and big capital projects such as the Canada Line rapid transit project are completed.
All this sounds just a little bit familiar…
