These excerpts from ‘A building boom goes silent’, an article in the Globe and Mail, February 19, 2009 -
Lynn Harrison has lost her job twice now in the boom-bust home building industry. This time, she’s getting out for good. The former marketing manager at British Columbia’s Vesta Properties Ltd. was laid off as the slump in the residential construction sector took hold late last year. She lost a job the first time during the 2000-2001 downturn, and now she’s looking for a senior marketing position in a completely different industry. “The cycle will come back but I don’t want to wait until it gets better,” said Ms. Harrison, who was laid off in December at Vesta, which is based in the Vancouver suburb of Langley. “No one wants to build a bunch of homes no one wants to buy. There are just times when you have to cut people.” Ms. Harrison was part one of the greatest job creation booms that drove employment in the sector to 1.2 million from about 800,000 at the beginning of the decade. And now she’s among those leaving as construction plummets.”
More from this article:
“What this does suggest is that there will be a lot of downside for construction employment.” (said Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc.)
In the third quarter of last year construction, both residential and commercial, accounted for 7.3 per cent of the overall employment in the country. Highly vulnerable to the downturn are provinces that rely heavily on construction, including British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. In British Columbia, for example, one in every 10 jobs is in the construction industry. Thousands of home-building jobs in the once-red-hot Lower Mainland of British Columbia are expected to be lost as the downturn spreads.