What province you live in might make a big difference in how healthy you think Canada’s economy is.
Generally, investment in non-residential building construction is up in Canada, but those increases are not distributed evenly across the provinces.
Prairie provinces such as Alberta and Manitoba have seen investment rise dramatically over the past three years. But in the four Atlantic provinces, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, investments are down.
And some economic experts say this is a sign of future trouble for the Atlantic provinces.
Investment in non-residential buildings is a measure of how much money is being spent on constructing anything that isn’t a residential household, excluding engineering work such as bridges, roads or dams, according to Mahamat Hamit-Haggar, a research economist with Statistics Canada. The numbers are derived from building permits, he said.
Non-Residential Construction – Daily (Text)
The latest figures released by Statistics Canada are from the third fiscal quarter of 2014. When compared with the same quarters in previous years, back to 2011, Alberta has seen an increase of almost $300 million. Nova Scotia, by contrast, has seen a decrease of almost $50 million. Newfoundland and Labrador has seen investment in that province cut in half since the third quarter of 2011.
Unlike residential construction, which usually is tied to interest rates, non-residential construction is tied to overall economic health, according to Mario Seccareccia, a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa.
“If you have a big increase in say, oil prices are a good example, that would simulate some investment in that sector or around it. Fort McMurray and all these places in Alberta would be feeling the growth,” Seccareccia said.
Hamit-Haggar said the changes between the most recent quarter and the one before are not noteworthy.
“If you compare the figures in the latest release … I do not describe the declines in the Atlantic provinces as significant decreases,” he said.
But it’s not quarter-to-quarter or year-to-year where trends are seen, according to Talan Iscan, a professor of economics at Dalhousie university,
“It’s a highly volatile component of GDP … You’ll see in any arbitrary year they’ll go up and down,” he said.
A long-term decline over several years, like the ones the Atlantic provinces are seeing, are easier to read, he said.
“When you go to the long-term trends, the news is pretty bad for all four [Atlantic] provinces,” he said.
Finding causes is hard. Because non-residential construction can be impacted by the health of any sector, it’s hard to pinpoint which ones are responsible, Iscan said. However, one known factor is oil.
Since the late 1990s, Canada’s economy has become closely tied to the oil sector, Seccareccia said. How the Canadian dollar trades is usually a good indication of where oil prices are, he said.
“We’ve become a petro-currency. Our Canadian dollar has been falling and guess what oil prices have been falling too. Once the international price of oil goes up or down, we tend to move in tandem with it. Not one-to-one, but close enough,” he said.
But this wasn’t always the case. In fact, it used to be that the opposite was true, Seccareccia said.
“Until the late 1990s, when you saw an increase in the price of oil, if anything, our dollar went down rather than up. This is because oil was not a big export,” he said.
Atlantic provinces had a little bit of oil in the past, but that has stopped in recent years, Iscan said.
“Newfoundland has reached a plateau, they’re not drilling any new platforms. Nova Scotia had a bit of … Natural gas but that has plateaued. In fact they’re thinking of closing some of these things by 2020,” he said.
“It has been about natural resources in most provinces,” he said.
Oil also has an impact on other sectors, such as manufacturing, Seccareccia said. In recent years, manufacturing has had an inverse relationship with oil. If one is doing well, the other suffers, he said, because of how oil and the Canadian dollar are linked.
“If the Canadian dollar goes up, it stifles the export of manufacturing goods,” he said.
Oil has been dropping in recent months, which would provide benefits for provinces with strong manufacturing bases like Ontario. But the Atlantic have provinces, who can’t benefit from strong oil economies, also don’t have much in the way of manufacturing.
“In the case of Atlantic Canada I think it’s a bit of a chronic situation there,” Seccareccia said.
Whether the Atlantic provinces make it out of the rut is hard to say, according to Iscan. Nova Scotia’s hope, he said, is a federal shipbuilding contract awarded in 2011 that will bring jobs in over the next years.
“I think everyone here is betting on the federal contract flowing in the way it has been announced,” he said.
For the other provinces, Iscan said he’s not expecting major changes.
“It’s not very optimistic, other than the shipyard contract. It’s going to chug along … no one is expecting a stellar next three to five years around here,” he said.