Vancouver is 'place to be'

Vancouver is 'place to be'

By Paul Luke, The Province May 14, 2010  

If you want to be in business in North America, you should be in Vancouver, Scotiabank chief economist Warren Jestin says.

B.C. and Alberta, endowed with resources the world wants, will lead the Canadian growth pack over the next five years, Jestin told a real-estate conference in Vancouver Thursday.

Within B.C., Vancouver is the business site of choice, Jestin said.

"If you look across Canada and North America as to where you want to be in business right now, there's no other place to be but right here," he said.

The manufacturing jobs lost in the global downturn will be recovered over the next several years. But small-and medium-size firms will lead job creation, not big manufacturers.

Job-generating companies will be the ones who find ways to serve global supply chains, he said.

"If you look across the country, the province that seems to have the best potential for growth in terms of the small-and medium-size sector would be B.C.," he said.

Business should brace for a volatile but parity-hungry loonie, he said. The Bank of Canada's key lending rate will rise by as much as two percentage points by this time next year, Jestin added.

"If you think interest rates are normal now, you are suffering from serious delusional thinking," he said.

As the world's baby boomers ride into retirement, governments will find it much tougher to balance their books than many people expect, he warned. Health-care costs, for one, will rise dramatically.

"When you're 60, the government spends twice as much on your health care as when you were 20," he said.

"When you're 70, they spend twice as much on you as when you were 60."

Jestin's comments follow a KPMG study released earlier this week that found the city has the lowest business-tax costs of 41 global cities.

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