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Business Council launches data dashboard with economic indicators, trends

The Business Council of B.C. has launched a new one-stop shop for those hungry for economic indicators and analysis of trends and emerging risks as the province tries to navigate its way through the pandemic.
BCBC dashboard
A screengrab of the B.C. Business Council's new dashboard, launched in April 2021.

The Business Council of B.C. has launched a new one-stop shop for those hungry for economic indicators and analysis of trends and emerging risks as the province tries to navigate its way through the pandemic.

The BCBC Economic Dashboard, which went live Tuesday, is a data aggregator that pulls information from a variety of sources and displays it in a user-friendly format that can provide a broad look at GDP growth, labour-force data and building permits, and deep dives into each of those topics.

The project, developed with KPMG, offers data from archived sources such as Statistics Canada and near real-time information from sources such as Google Mobility, Geo Tab and Covid19Tracker.ca that can provide updates three or four times each day.

Greg D’Avignon, chief executive of the Business Council, called the dashboard an invaluable tool for business leaders and public-policy makers, saying it will allow anyone to track how the province is recovering and how it’s doing economically compared with other jurisdictions.

He noted that while the dashboard was developed to provide insight into economic health as B.C. deals with and eventually emerges from the pandemic, it will have lasting value for the ongoing health of the province.

KPMG regional managing partner Walter Pela said “in an era where there is no shortage of data, there is tremendous value from collecting, organizing and analyzing the vast amounts of information at hand to derive meaning and insights.”

The dashboard offers buttons for economic indicators such as construction, labour, consumer, exports and for the time being, COVID-19.

Ken Peacock, chief economist at the Business Council, said KPMG has made economic data accessible to a broad array of users. The dashboard will evolve over time, with new sources of information.

The dashboard can be found at bcbc.com/dashboard.