April 6, 2006
Check Against Delivery
It's great to be here tonight. I want to first say how pleased I am that we're here in the traditional territory of the Westbank first nation and the Okanagan Nation and that Chief Robert Louie has joined us. Robert, thank you very much for coming today.
It's great to be here, because this conference and the theme of your conference is "A World of Opportunity," and it gives me a chance to talk a little bit about the opportunities that we face in British Columbia and that I hope you face in your industry.
The other day I was out in Langley and I was at the Chapters bookstore. I bought myself a couple of books, which is a record for me. Normally, it's four or five. I got a couple of books in Langley, and I stood in the line, and you could see some real buzzing going on behind the counter. And there was a young cashier standing there says: "Oh, come on up here. Come on over here."
So I come over there, and she takes my books, and she takes my credit card, and she says: "Do I know you?" And I sort of smile, and I said: "Well...." And she says: "You're Kurt Alberts, aren't you? the mayor of Langley township? I said: "No, I'm not Kurt Alberts, but I'm the Premier of the…." "Oh," she says, "I'm sorry; I don't know much about that political stuff."
So it keeps you humble, and it also makes you guys know in local government you're still number one in everybody's minds.
It is great to be here and to talk to COFI. And today I want to talk a little bit about opportunities, but I'm going to be pretty straightforward about it. Opportunities sit out there for us. We can decide we're going to take advantage of them, but I've noticed one thing about opportunities. They never walk over to your front door and into your living room and present themselves to you. You actually have to work to take advantage of them.
And we have tons of opportunities here. We've watched as our province has changed and our economy has changed. I could go to just about every community in the province and they'll tell me that their economy is humming.
There's a little bit of a worker shortage across the province of British Columbia now. It doesn't matter whether it's energy or even in forestry, in tourism, in technology, in health care, we have an economy that's hungry for more workers, hungry for more investment, and we have to try and respond to that. It's a different set of challenges than we may have faced at the end of the 1990s.
You look in the communities across British Columbia and you'll see some of the fruits of economic growth. In Abbotsford there's 142 percent increase in the number of housing starts. In Kamloops it's 195 percent. In Duncan it's 331 percent. In Prince George it's 269 percent. Those are big numbers. In Penticton it's 241 percent.
Now, when I see those towns, one of the really critical components of any economy of any town, of any city in British Columbia is the forest industry. It is driving opportunities. It's driving economic growth. It's driving investment. But we have to look to the future and say, "How do we maintain that?" And boy, we face some challenges as well as opportunities.
In the last number of months I've been trying to have our national vision changed in Canada. I want Canada to understand that this is the future of Canada: the west, Alberta, British Columbia. British Columbia is the only Pacific province in Canada. We're the only one.
Now, you may wonder why I'd have to underline that, but I can tell you, I remember when I was first elected a mayor. I went to a meeting, and at that meeting was a mayor named Laurence Decore, the mayor of Edmonton; and a mayor named Ralph Klein, who was the mayor of Calgary. And I was sitting there and I was very new at the job. I was quietly listening and being polite, not talking too much. And then Ralph Klein and Laurence Decore explained to the group that they were Pacific Rim cities.
I had to explain there were Rocky Mountains between them and the Pacific. We are the Pacific, and what flows through us to the Pacific is a huge number of opportunities. In Korea, one of our Pacific neighbours, we watched as there's a half a million housing starts every year. Only 3,000 Korean houses are wood frame. We're right next door, and I don't know you if you guys have noticed this: we've got a lot of wood here that we can sell to Korea. In fact, Korea wants us to recognize them as a market that's waiting for us.
We watch as wood-frame starts in Korea have doubled in the last two years, but we've got to do more. China. We're right next to it; the closest point on the continent to China
