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This Economy at a Glance will further explore employment data provided by Statistics Canada.
Chief Economist, CanaData
This Economy at a Glance will further explore employment data provided by Statistics Canada.
It will look at the growth in construction jobs in 11 of the major cities across the country, annual-averages 2000 to annual-averages 2013.
For ease of comparison, the series in Graphs 1 and 2 have been indexed. This simply means that actual employment levels in years subsequent to 2000 are divided by their opening level.
By employing this methodology, they all have the same starting point, 2000 = 100.0.
Nationally, there are only six census metropolitan areas (CMAs) with populations exceeding one million. (A CMA designation has the most extensive borders for suburbs around an urban core.)
Clearly, from Graph 1, Edmonton has been the one to beat in this 13-year comparison of construction employment.
Montreal also has a strong record, followed by Vancouver.
Calgary, Toronto and Ottawa-Gatineau form a second lower tier.
Graph 2 looks at the next three largest population centres — Winnipeg, Quebec City and Hamilton (about three-quarters of a million people each) — plus two cities that are “up and comers” — Saskatoon (nearly 300,000) and Regina (225,000).
Among those five, only Saskatoon has sped ahead faster than Edmonton, although Quebec City and Regina aren’t far behind.
New and renovation residential work usually accounts for one-third to one-half of all construction activity in a region.
Therefore, one might expect a close correlation between an increase in the number of construction jobs and local population change. In turn, population growth drives other categories of non-residential building construction (schools, medical facilities, shopping malls, etc.)
This argument receives only limited support from Table 1, however, which sets out the 2000 to 2012 population jumps for the same 11 cities as shown in the graphs. (CMA population estimates are as of July 1 each year. The latest such figures are for 2012.)
There are several instances — Calgary and Toronto most notably — where population growth has been exceptional, but the impact on construction jobs has been relatively restrained.
For Quebec City, Montreal and Regina, the inverse has been the case, with the overall growth in construction jobs far outpacing population change.
Other factors are playing important roles in the local construction market.
For example, a government presence can provide a more stable path for construction jobs.
While Ottawa-Gatineau (our federal capital) and Winnipeg and Regina (provincial capitals) may not have recorded the best construction employment records over the entire period, they sailed through the 2009-2010 recessionary downturns relatively unscathed.
Also, some individual large projects in transportation (Edmonton), commercial office towers (Calgary) and mega hospital jobs (Montreal) have also provided extraordinary boosts to construction work levels in some cities.
Finally, proximity to raw materials has been important as well. The logistics of shorter supply lines helps extraction firms realize cost savings.
In Alberta and Saskatchewan, where two cities compete fiercely for labour market bragging rights, hailing distance to northern resource projects has established the winners, Edmonton and Saskatoon.
For more articles by Alex Carrick on the Canadian and U.S. economies, please see his market insights. Mr. Carrick also has an economics blog.
Graph 1: Construction Employment in Canada’s Six Largest Cities
Graph 2: Construction Employment in Five Other Canadian Cities
Table 1: Ranking of 11 Canadian Cities: 2000 to 2012 Total Population Change
Data source: Statistics Canada (Cansim Table 051-0046). Chart: Reed Construction Data – CanaData.
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