Opinion: What we want for our kids is here in B.C. I hope my daughter finds work that engages her and provides financial security. I tell her: Stay in B.C., where we have one of the most remarkable knowledge economies in the world.
A Family Story of Migration and Ambition
The instinct that caused my parents, William and Wilma Macfarlane, to move to B.C. wasn't just about leaving Scotland; it was about where they were coming to: a place with potential, with energy, hungry for new immigrants and ambitious to build something extraordinary.
My grandfather was born in Scotland. He was a journeyman engine-fitter who lived in the east end of Glasgow. His son — my father — left school at 17 and began work in the National Engineering Laboratory. He did well, but his girlfriend — later his wife and my mother — supported by his parents, convinced him that he could do more, and he enrolled in Glasgow University, graduating in 1966 with a B.Sc. in Engineering, the first ever in his family to go to university. In 1974, my parents decided that perhaps the U.K. and its class system wasn't the best place for them, and they packed up their three young daughters and emigrated to Canada.
Those three girls — I'm one — each ended up with two degrees.
That's how it happens in real life. Change happens slowly, then quickly. We want more for our kids than we aspired to ourselves. It's the quiet choices people make for their children that change the world.
My Daughter's Future in a Changing Economy
My daughter is 13. She wants to be a vet or maybe a nurse or maybe a YouTuber. Or maybe a coder — but she finds that a bit boring. Her instincts about what's interesting and what's not might point the way to the future more accurately than she realizes. AI means machines are getting very good at coding themselves, and what coding looks like in 2030 may be quite different. The economy she will work in isn't the one we live in today and the pathways to success are changing. It's faster, stranger, more disruptive and perhaps more accessible than we would like to admit.
The Gap in B.C.'s Economic Conversation
Which brings me to the gap at the heart of B.C.'s economic conversation. In B.C. Tech's new research report, we present data that is striking and surprising, but not complicated. The technology sector is now bigger than even the resources sector — 9.6 per cent of provincial GDP versus 7.2 per cent — and growing at three times the rate of the economy as a whole.
B.C. has 271,000 tech sector workers earning wages that are 70 per cent above the provincial average in communities from Victoria to Prince George to Kelowna. Their income taxes and consumption taxes help fund a large part of B.C.'s government and the health care, education and social services we all depend on.
The data that underpins the report is solid — it comes from Statistics Canada and B.C. Stats — and our researchers double and triple-checked it, because it just didn't seem plausible given the prevailing narrative in B.C. about our economy.
Shifting the Narrative from Hard Hats to Laptops
B.C.'s political conversation still reaches instinctively for the hard hat. Not because the people reaching for it are ill-intentioned, but because the hard hat stands for something that feels real in a way a laptop doesn't. Tangible. Physical. Honest toil. Funnily enough, the overwhelming majority of British Columbians giving speeches about hard hats have never worn one in their working lives. They do their work at a screen, producing things that don't ship in containers.
My friend Andrea Reimer, one of the sharpest political minds I know, says that stories are more powerful than data. She's right — and B.C. has a story problem on the economy. We're telling ourselves a story about an economy we remember rather than engaging with the one we live in.
