September 5, 2007 | In Business, Politics |
British Columbia is the third strongest performing labour market in Canada, behind Alberta and Saskatchewan, but could rise to the number one spot with looser provincial labour laws, according to a recent report by the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver-based free market think-tank.
Alberta came out on top of the study, which measured employment growth, productivity, unemployment, and other factors in each U.S. state and Canadian province. Saskatchewan scored the tenth place overall, while BC came in twelfth. No other Canadian province made the top-30.
“If we actually improved the characteristics of labour markets we would be among the top performing labour markets in North America,” explained the Fraser Institute’s director of fiscal studies, Niels Veldhuis, who credits the three western provinces’ booming economies for their current strong performance. “We would probably be No. 1. And that’s the message here for B.C., that we can be even better than what we have been in the last five years if we improve some of our characteristics.”
This could mean relaxing labour laws, reducing the percentage of employees working in the public sector, and reducing the minimum wage in relation to the average wage, Veldhuis said.
“All of these things have been shown by academic research to have negative impacts on labour markets,” he said, giving Alberta as an example of a free market leader. “They have lower unionization, they have less public-sector employment, they certainly have a much lower minimum wage relative to the average wage, and they have more balanced labour-relations laws.”
