The Campbell government is busy crowing over the November unemployment rate of 6.4%. It is truly good news that every region in the province now has single digit unemployment, but it is sad that was not achieved through job growth. BC's unemployment rate went down because thousands of workers became discouraged and stopped looking for work. On a seasonally adjusted basis, 10,600 fewer people were in BC's labour force in November; on an unadjusted basis there were 18,900 fewer workers in BC's labour force. If those workers had continued looking for work and reported that they were unemployed, the unemployment rate would be 6.9%.

Employment in BC has grown from 1.04 million in January 1976 to 2.09 million in November 2004 (seasonally adjusted). The graph shows that almost steady increase, interrupted by the 1982-83 downturn and by the 2001 slowdown. The red line in the graph shows seasonally adjusted employment; the black line shows the long term trend (an exponential curve fitted to the data). Notice that employment was above the trend line throughout the 90s and below the trend line in the "New Era". That won't stop the Campbell government from claiming that its policies have produced record growth. What the record actually shows for 2004 is that BC is trailing Canada in job creation. As of November, employment for 2004 is up by 1.0% in BC compared to 1.2% for Canada. BC's not just below the Canadian average; when the provinces are ranked in year to date job growth, BC finishes 8th. Maybe that is why there are some "discouraged" workers.