BC Business
Our 11th annual fly-over of the province’s economic heat map finds that Vancouver Island is still hot but Metro Vancouver is, for a change, not
A decade ago, Jason and Alayne MacIsaac decided to make a life change. Jason gave up his job as a chef and Alayne quit hers in sales and marketing. They bought a property in Shirley, a tiny hamlet on the foggy southwest coast of Vancouver Island. They lived in the main house and convinced the Capital Regional District, the only municipal authority in the area, to let them turn the adjacent carriage house into a craft distillery. They named it Sheringham after the Sheringham Point lighthouse just a short walk away.
That first year they produced 2,000 litres of gin, incorporating uniquely local ingredients such as kelp, juniper and rose petals. The quiet life got a little louder when Sheringham’s Seaside Gin won the title of Best Contemporary Gin at the World Gin Awards in London barely a year later.
“That helped get a lot of attention on our business and our product,” Jason MacIsaac says. “It was an affirmation that we were producing world-class products. We were at that level.”
More accolades followed, and the public —not just in B.C., but also in Alberta, Ontario and Washington—developed a taste for Sheringham Distillery’s gin, whisky, vodka, liqueurs and akvavit (a spirit traditionally produced in Scandinavia). By 2018, the carriage house in Shirley couldn’t handle the demand, so the MacIsaacs moved their stills to a larger site in nearby Sooke. Almost immediately, though, Jason realized they’d need still bigger premises. Over five years in Sooke, the distillery’s output shot up from 20,000 to 100,000 litres per year.
So in 2023 Sheringham pulled up stakes yet again, moving east to the Victoria suburb of Langford. For the MacIsaacs, the big attraction was having the space to expand even further if they needed to.
“We have the ability to grow under this roof,” Jason says.
But Langford, one of B.C.’s fastest-growing municipalities and No. 2 on this year’s survey of B.C.’s Most Economically Resilient Cities, had a lot of other things going for it, too. While still close to Sheringham’s West Coast roots, “it’s a great location for shipping and receiving,” Jason says. Being more accessible helps Sheringham attract more visitors to its tasting room. “For people travelling up and down the Island on Highway 1, it’s quite simple for them to take West Shore Parkway to come visit us.”
For a decade now—2025 is the 11th iteration—BCBusiness has been striving to capture the pulse of the province’s most vibrant local economies. Initially an exercise in identifying promising job markets for post-secondary graduates and working people looking for a life change, our Best Cities for Work survey evolved into the more comprehensive Most Economically Resilient Cities research project that you see here.
This year, we took the 50 municipalities in B.C. with at least 10,000 residents, which enabled us to find like-for-like data on everything from population growth to job creation to real estate activity. With the help of our research partner, Environics Analytics, we added in proprietary data around these cities’ economic diversity, household financial vulnerability and residents’ sense of belonging. All told, we took nine different criteria into account, giving each city a relative score on each.
It’s worth noting that our methodology is designed to exaggerate the differences between the municipalities’ vital signs to help rank them. In the grand scheme of things, the prospects for getting a job or starting a business in No. 1-ranked Sidney or No. 50 Quesnel are not so disparate as the scoring system would have them appear.
Nonetheless, the exercise gives a sense of which places on the map are thriving and which, for whatever reasons, may be taking a pause. Similar to our 2024 survey, Vancouver Island communities dominate the upper echelons of the list. Capital Region municipalities Sidney, Langford and Central Saanich took all three podium positions, while Nanaimo (p.36) rose 21 spots and landed in the top 10 for the first time in five years. That’s not hard to explain: ever since the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of remote work, the Island has been a favoured destination of newly footloose workers leaving Vancouver and other high-priced cities for lifestyle and cost-of-living reasons. We might also expect the home of the provincial government to fare well when an outsized portion of province-wide job creation is coming from the public sector, as it has over the past few years.
One trend more evident in this year’s survey than in the past is the relatively poor showing by Metro Vancouver municipalities. The obvious reason is that employment growth turned negative in the region in 2024, which had ripple effects on the unemployment rate, property sales and household finances. By contrast, the job market has remained buoyant on the Island and in the Fraser and Okanagan valleys. Northern cities and towns were once again handicapped by the wind-down in energy megaprojects and the longer-term challenges facing the forest industry. The biggest gainer over the past year was Duncan/North Cowichan, rising 29 spots to No. 13. The biggest loser was Richmond, which fell 26 spots to No. 39. Other big droppers included Langley (25 spots), Burnaby and Nelson (both 23 spots).
Sheringham Distillery is not alone in noticing Langford’s appeal. Between the 2016 and 2021 federal censuses, the city’s population grew by an astonishing 31.8 percent. In 2019, it attracted pro soccer team Pacific FC of the Canadian Premier League to its Starlight Stadium. Plexxis Software moved its headquarters there from Brampton, Ontario, in 2021, along with 100 high-tech jobs. This summer, a unique multi-school campus is opening downtown to accommodate new classroom space for Royal Roads University, the University of Victoria, the Justice Institute of B.C. and Camosun College. The community is also rolling out new industrial space with Langford Heights Business Park and Pacific Ridge Business Centre and plans are in the works for a film and television studio.
Jason MacIsaac credits the City of Langford with being proactive about attracting his business. Members of both the planning and building departments paid Sheringham Distillery a visit in Sooke within days of his initial enquiries. All through the relocation, they answered questions and helped the operation get the permits, suppliers and advisors it needed.
The reception by other Langford businesses likewise surprised MacIsaac. Before long, Sheringham was co-hosting events with the newly opened House of Boateng nearby, which MacIsaac describes as bringing a higher level of cuisine and service to the once semi-rural suburb. He also applauds the recent renovation of the Westin Bear Mountain Resort and considers the spa there world-class. Langford Station, an indoor/outdoor public space recently redeveloped along a disused rail corridor, has become a favourite local gathering place, animated by food trucks, interactive lighting, art studios and live music from time to time.
These days Sheringham no longer qualifies under the “craft distillery” designation in B.C.—its volume is too high. But even in its more expansive location, MacIsaac says, “we still do everything by hand. It’s still very mom-and-pop.” Langford offers a happy medium between a busy metropolitan and an authentically West Coast location, he adds. “Everything we do has a feel of place, of the region.”
Another surprise in this year’s Most Resilient survey was the rise of Sechelt into a top-10 position. The only Southern Sunshine Coast community large enough, with a population of 11,754, to qualify for our survey rose 10 spots on our list on the strength of solid economic, job-creation and real estate development indicators. (Curiously, the district did not score well on sense of belonging, possibly because so many of its residents have moved there from someplace else.)
“I’m glad your research sees what I see in the community. I see tremendous potential,” says Gaetan Royer, chair of the Sunshine Coast Chamber of Commerce and founder of development advisory firm CityState Consulting. Five years ago, Gaetan and his wife, Zoe, took a vacation in the area and ended up purchasing a satellite office of Port Moody-based CityState in Sechelt’s downtown. The firm secured local clients and now boasts involvement with more than 1,000 housing units in various stages of development on the Sunshine Coast.
“Our biggest project is Sunshine Trails, which is the development of West Sechelt,” Gaetan says. “While home base is the lower mainland, we’re working toward an eventual retirement here, my wife and I.” Zoe became a director of the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts while Gaetan was approached to be a member, then chair, of the Sechelt Chamber of Commerce.
What happened next encapsulates the spirit of the community, he says. Gaetan was quickly recruited into a drive to amalgamate the Sechelt, Gibsons and Pender Harbour chambers into a single Sunshine Coast Chamber of Commerce.
“People see the region as one region,” he explains. “If Pender Harbour is successful in bringing a family to the area for a visit, they’re going to end up shopping and eating in Gibsons or Sechelt and possibly even looking at real estate in the area. Everybody benefits.”
There was nonetheless some resistance to the idea of absorbing the smaller chambers, which had a history going back more than half a century, into a regional association. To combine all three, the proponents of the idea were going to have to get the membership of all three chambers onside. Gaetan instinctively understood that the way to success was to over-communicate and to involve as many people as possible in the process.
“It became evident very early on that the membership at large was in support of a single chamber of commerce,” he says. “The amount of goodwill that we enjoyed was quite overwhelming. It was rewarding to make a presentation and in all cases be applauded for the work that we did.”
Indeed, the amalgamation was met with unanimous approval in votes in all three communities in the fall of 2023 and the Sunshine Coast Chamber was launched early in 2024.
That willingness to do what needs to be done extends to local government on the Coast, adds Gaetan, who spent 20 years in municipal and regional government in the Lower Mainland and continues to deal with planning and building departments as well as communicating with residents at community meetings throughout B.C. He’s encountered plenty of resistance to change in some communities, but not here.
“Sechelt is one of those areas that I think understands the housing crisis, understands the social issues behind the housing crisis and is realistic about the need for change,” he says. When residents pushed back against one of the area projects CityState was working on, he worked with the development to address their concerns. They were soon satisfied and the project went ahead. “We completely avoided the acrimony that we might have faced elsewhere.”
Long neglected, the tourism infrastructure all along the Sunshine Coast is undergoing an upgrade, says Laurie Reid, owner of Pedals & Paddles, a kayak rental and tour company in Sechelt. “The tourist portion of the economy is very strong,” she says. Summer activity is at capacity such that operators are looking for ways to shift some of the load onto the shoulder seasons too. Two hotel properties have had recent facelifts to help accommodate the summer rush.
There has also been construction on new seniors’ housing such as Green Court, along with rental apartments and retail. Two seasons of the TV crime series Murder in a Small Town have been shot in the area, attracting not only production revenue but also interest from the show’s fans.
The Sunshine Coast Chamber’s next priority is to host a regional investment forum that it hopes will take place in the fall of this year. Gaetan Royer would like to see private developers and businesses looking for space, along with local governments and nonprofits getting together to talk about opportunities in housing, tourism infrastructure and industrial development. The District of Sechelt has land on the northeast shore of Sechelt Inlet that is “begging for investment,” he says, and the regional district owns a large, underutilized tract near the Langdale ferry terminal. “We want to make something happen there,” he says.
In our quest to identify British Columbia’s most economically resilient cities, we analyzed nine key metrics, each assigned weightings ranging from 5 to 15 points. Each city was assigned a score out of 95 points and is ranked based on their performance.
This figure represents the population growth for each city from 2019 to 2024. We gave the highest-growth city 10 points and scored the others in proportion to that.
This figure—an index created by Environics Analytics—looks at a range of household financial variables, including debt, liquid assets and discretionary income, to show how precarious a typical household’s finances are in a given city. The higher the index value, the more vulnerable a city’s households are on average. Therefore, we gave the lowest value 15 points and scored the others in relation to that.
This value represents the sense of belonging that a resident has within their community, as derived from Environics Analytics’ Community Life Survey. Cities who had a greater share of residents reporting a “very strong” or “somewhat strong” sense of belonging scored higher than those with more residents reporting a “somewhat weak” or “very weak” sense of belonging. We assumed that cities with a stronger sense of community had stronger social resiliency. The city with the highest sense of belonging received a score of 5, with the others scoring in proportion.
This indicator reflects the reported vacancy rate for rental housing units from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.’s annual Rental Market Survey. Housing market observers, such as the Royal Bank of Canada, consider a healthy rental vacancy rate to be between 3% and 5%. Therefore, a vacancy rate of 4% received the maximum score of 10, with cities above or below that value scoring proportionately less.
This number, from quarterly BC Assessment data, reflects the year-to-date sales totals for single-family and strata residential properties to the end of September 2024. After dividing sales totals by total city population, we multiplied that figure by 10,000 to determine the number of sales per 10,000 residents. We gave the highest value 10 points and scored the others accordingly.
We derived this value from the year-to-date housing starts from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.’s monthly Starts and Completions Survey to the end of September 2024. The city with the highest number of housing starts per 10,000 residents received a score of 10, with the other cities scoring in relation to that.
This figure measures the change in the employed labour force from January to September 2024, derived from StatsCan’s monthly Labour Force Survey. We scored the year-to-date difference in jobs out of a maximum value of 10.
For this indicator, we averaged unemployment rates for each city from the first three quarters of the year. The averages were derived from rates reported in StatsCan’s monthly Labour Force Survey for January through September 2024. We gave the lowest average 10 points and evaluated the others in relation to that.
This value is derived by applying the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index—a common means of measuring diversity—to StatsCan employment data to determine the labour force diversity of a city’s residents. The closer this number is to 10,000 the less diverse a city’s workforce is while a number closer to 0 represents a more diverse workforce. Therefore, we gave the lowest value 15 points and scored the others in relation to that