If economic recovery were fine art, Victoria’s emergence from the spectre of the COVID-19 pandemic would be a study in light and shadow.
Numbers released this week by the City of Victoria suggest the recovery from the economic turmoil is continuing, amid pockets of despair and a few shining peaks.
“From the outset of recovery, we were always told the process wouldn’t be a matter of flipping a switch, but more like turning up the light with a dimmer,” said Bruce Williams, chief executive of the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce.
“According to the data presented, it looks very promising and more so every day.”
There is some very good news in the numbers, with the construction industry continuing to soar while the film industry is back to work in a big way.
Building permit applications were up 14.5 per cent last year to 1,346 compared with the previous year, but still lagging behind the 1,494 applied for in 2019.
The value of construction permits, on the other hand, was up to $705 million last year, from $359 million in 2020 and $259 million in 2019.
At the same time, 104 film permits were issued last year, a jump from 79 in 2020 and 64 in 2019. The number of business licences was also on the rise with 2,214 new ones issued, up from 1,711 in 2020 and 1,664 in 2019.
But still dragging is the return to office work, which has a massive effect on the health of downtown restaurants and retail operations.
The return to work has been estimated at about 28 per cent based on 12 key downtown buildings, which may account for the overall pedestrian numbers hitting 9.63 million last year, about the same as 2020, but well off the 17.5 million counted in 2019.
“Obviously if you’re running a retail business or a lunchtime coffee shop, you want your best customers who are the ones that work in the buildings above you and around you, but I would say that one of the silver linings from COVID is the fact that people in the whole region have really embraced shopping local and making those purposeful shopping decisions,” said Jeff Bray, executive director of the Downtown Victoria Business Association.
He said that kind of shopping was pronounced around the holidays and made some of the difference in not having a full complement of office workers in the core.
“The hope and expectation now is that, as office workers come back over the course of the summer and as tourism picks up significantly, some of that activity will bring businesses back to where they were pre-COVID which is very strong,” he said.
“The data shows we’ve come through COVID fairly well … we’re really seeing activity starting to return to what it looked like before, and we still haven’t got office workers back and got our tourist season back,” Bray said. “I think it really speaks to the resiliency of the overall economy and the downtown economy.”
