B.C.’s Economic Future Is Bigger Than Oil and Gas

British Columbia Canada — Economic Future
 Is Bigger Than Oil and Gas

British Columbia's, Canada -  Economic Future Is -  Bigger Than Oil and Gas

B.C.’s Other Resource Economy Is Already Here

The jobs beneath our streets and along our coast may be one of the biggest economic opportunities we are overlooking

For most British Columbians, a big economic project is easy to recognize.

A new mine is announced and we hear how many billions of dollars will be invested. An LNG project gets approved and we hear about thousands of construction jobs. A pipeline is expanded and governments talk about exports, workers and economic growth.

Those jobs are real, and they matter. British Columbia needs miners, welders, mechanics, electricians, engineers, truck drivers, equipment operators and the industries that employ them.

But there is another resource economy already operating around us that receives remarkably little attention when we talk about B.C.’s economic future.

It is the ocean.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada estimates that British Columbia’s broad marine economy supported 97,560 direct jobs in 2024 and generated about $8.53 billion in direct GDP. That includes far more than fishing. It includes tourism and recreation, marine transportation, ship and boat building, harbour construction, seafood production and processing and other businesses that depend on B.C.’s working coast. Pêches et Océans Canada

That means we are not talking about inventing some new “green economy” and hoping somebody eventually gets a job from it.

Nearly 100,000 direct marine jobs already exist.

The more interesting question is how many more could exist if British Columbia began treating the waters supporting those jobs with the same economic seriousness we give other natural resources.

Could the marine economy grow by 25 per cent? Fifty per cent? Could particular sectors such as shellfish, seafood processing, marine technology, restoration and coastal tourism eventually grow several times their present size?

Could some parts grow tenfold?

Those are not numbers we should simply promise. They have to be earned species by species, harbour by harbour and community by community.

But after decades of watching B.C. study damaged watersheds while continuing to pour money into other resource sectors, I believe it is time taxpayers were at least shown the size of the opportunity.

And much of it begins in a surprising place.

Underground.

Before we can grow the coast, we have to fix what flows into it

We often talk about sewage pipes, storm drains and septic systems as though they belong in a completely different discussion from fisheries or economic development.

They do not.

An oyster does not care whether the bacteria entering its growing area came from a municipal sewer, a failing septic system, agricultural runoff or contaminated stormwater.

If the water becomes unsafe, the harvest can be restricted or closed.

Environment and Climate Change Canada specifically lists municipal sewage, septic systems, boat sewage, agricultural runoff and stormwater from polluted areas among the sources capable of contaminating shellfish waters. If sanitary conditions deteriorate enough, harvesting areas can be closed. Canada

That makes a sewer pipe part of the seafood economy.

It makes a properly functioning septic system part of the seafood economy.

It makes stormwater treatment part of the seafood economy.

And it means that repairing old infrastructure can create employment twice: first for the people doing the repair, and later for the industries that can use cleaner water.

That is the economic connection we have largely failed to make.

Look at what Washington has already built

The shellfish example is particularly revealing because we can look just across the Salish Sea.

Washington State describes itself as the leading shellfish-aquaculture producer in the United States, with annual aquaculture production estimated at more than US$200 million. WSDA

Puget Sound has roughly 260,000 acres of commercial shellfish-growing areas, about 87 per cent of which are currently suitable for harvest. Washington also tracks closures and reopenings closely enough to show the economic connection between pollution control and food production. In 2025, for example, repairs to failing septic systems and pollution-source investigations helped several growing areas regain harvest classifications. At the same time, increased wastewater flows and industrial activity caused other profitable shellfish areas to be closed. Puget Sound Info

That is the system working the way an economic resource-management system should work: find the pollution source, repair it, measure the water and determine whether productive acreage can be reopened.

Washington’s wild geoduck fishery provides another example. State auctions generate nearly US$22 million a year in government revenue, and Washington uses some of that money to restore aquatic habitat. Harvest supports restoration, and restoration protects the resource that produces the harvest. Washington DNR

British Columbia’s coastline is vastly larger than Puget Sound.

Yet B.C.’s farmed shellfish industry produced only about 9,537 tonnes in 2024, worth roughly $36 million at the farm level. That included oysters, clams, mussels and scallops. Processing is not included in that farm-gate value. Pêches et Océans Canada

We should not simply multiply Washington’s numbers and announce what B.C. “should” be producing. Our coast is different. Much of it is rocky or remote. Markets, tenures, transportation, labour and regulations all matter.

But those numbers should make any taxpayer curious.

We have one of the longest coastlines in the world.

We have extraordinarily productive marine waters.

We already have a seafood industry.

And in places where we do have sanitary contamination problems, we sometimes rely on restricted harvesting and depuration—taking shellfish from affected water and purging them under controlled clean-water conditions before they can be marketed.

But economically, there is a more fundamental question:

Why are we spending money managing contaminated food-growing waters instead of putting greater effort into stopping preventable contamination before it gets there?

Greater Victoria gives us a small glimpse of the size of the work

This is where our own Core Area research becomes relevant to the larger B.C. jobs story.

We have spent years examining the buried sanitary and stormwater systems serving Victoria, Saanich, Esquimalt, Oak Bay and View Royal.

Our working estimate puts the public sanitary and storm-sewer replacement exposure at approximately $4.8 billion to $4.9 billion. When a reasonable range for private sewer laterals is included, the practical long-term exposure rises to approximately $5.3 billion to $7 billion. Those figures still do not fully include future borrowing costs, complete stormwater source control, contaminated-sediment remediation, outfall treatment or repeated road reconstruction. reflections-on-canada-s-2005-wi…

That is one urban region.

Victoria alone represents about $1.4 billion in public wastewater and stormwater replacement exposure, with a much larger figure once private laterals are considered. reflections-on-canada-s-2005-wi…

Saanich reports roughly $1.375 billion in drainage assets and $1.136 billion in wastewater assets, along with large existing renewal backlogs and funding gaps. reflections-on-canada-s-2005-wi…

Esquimalt’s newer asset work puts the replacement value of its sanitary system at about $223 million, while its stormwater network represents another major long-term renewal program.

Oak Bay has documented severe wet-weather inflow and infiltration and aging sanitary and storm infrastructure.

These are not simply old pipes that we can safely admire for another fifty years.

CRD itself says deteriorating pipes and improper connections allow rainwater and groundwater into sanitary systems, consuming capacity and contributing to sewer overflows and beach closures. The remaining Clover Point overflow is currently predicted to operate for about 60 hours during the eight largest winter storms in a typical year. Get Involved CRD

For generations, the Harbour, Gorge and connected waterways have received the consequences of old infrastructure, cross-connections, stormwater contamination, industrial runoff and other sources.

We have studied it.

We have monitored it.

We have repaired pieces of it.

What has been missing is investment at the scale of the accumulated problem.

Now look at that $7-billion problem differently

To a taxpayer, $5 billion or $7 billion sounds frightening.

It should.

It is a huge bill.

But it is also a huge amount of work.

Our Core Area planning exercise shows that a 25-year renewal program addressing public systems and a substantial portion of private laterals would require roughly $214 million to $237 million a year. A full-renewal program approaching $7 billion averages about $279 million annually over 25 years, before financing and inflation. reflections-on-canada-s-2005-wi…

Where does that money go?

It does not vanish into the ground.

It pays excavator operators.

Pipe layers.

Plumbers.

Surveyors.

Engineers.

Electricians.

Truck drivers.

Road crews.

Concrete workers.

Pump technicians.

CCTV inspection crews.

Laboratory staff.

Equipment mechanics.

Water and wastewater operators.

Manufacturers and suppliers.

B.C. already has some evidence of the employment intensity of this kind of work. In 2017, Canada and B.C. announced $373.2 million for 144 water and wastewater projects around the province and estimated that the work would create close to 4,000 direct and indirect jobs. Canada

If that old program is used only as a rough employment benchmark—not a promise—the scale of a $5.3-billion to $7-billion Core Area program corresponds to something in the range of roughly 57,000 to 75,000 direct and indirect job-years over the life of the work, or something like 2,300 to 3,000 jobs supported in an average year over 25 years.

Those are not 75,000 permanent people.

They are an illustration of the amount of employment represented by a long construction and renewal program.

And Greater Victoria is only one piece of the coast.

Now imagine every coastal community doing the work it already has to do

Move north from Victoria.

Cowichan.

Nanaimo.

Parksville.

Qualicum.

Courtenay.

Comox.

Campbell River.

Port Alberni.

The Gulf Islands.

The Sunshine Coast.

Metro Vancouver.

The Fraser Valley.

Powell River.

Prince Rupert.

Kitimat.

Haida Gwaii.

Then include rural septic systems, First Nations infrastructure, small-community wastewater systems, agricultural runoff improvements and private sewer laterals.

Nobody has yet assembled a reliable province-wide coastal replacement bill that I would publish as fact.

But Greater Victoria tells us something about the scale.

If five municipalities in one relatively small part of Vancouver Island are facing billions of dollars in underground renewal, the coastal B.C. total is clearly far larger.

And we cannot escape that work simply by not calling it an economic program.

The pipes still have to be repaired.

Housing makes this even more urgent

British Columbia wants and needs more housing.

But every new house and apartment connects to something underground.

More toilets mean more wastewater.

More roofs, roads, driveways and parking areas mean more runoff.

More people require more water.

More commercial development places more demand on the same systems.

We cannot keep treating housing construction above ground and infrastructure capacity below ground as unrelated issues.

A municipality cannot indefinitely add thousands of new units to aging systems that already have major renewal deficits and then be surprised when capacity, infiltration, overflow and drainage problems become more expensive.

The infrastructure investment is part of the housing investment.

And in a coastal community, the water leaving that infrastructure eventually becomes part of the marine economy.

That is the connection Jack and Jill should be able to see.

A sewer replacement is not just a bill.

It supports housing.

It employs tradespeople.

It protects treatment capacity.

And if it removes a sewage source affecting downstream water, it can also help protect or recover beaches, habitat and food-growing areas.

The first job is fixing the problem. The second job is using the resource again.

This is what makes the marine opportunity different from simply creating a bigger cleanup industry.

I do not want B.C.’s economic plan to be based on employing people forever to clean up the same mess.

The goal should be to stop the damage.

Fix the sanitary system.

Fix the storm sewer.

Repair the failing septic system.

Deal with runoff at the source.

Then let the natural resource become productive again.

If a shellfish bed reopens, the pipe crew has finished its job—but somebody else may now have work.

A grower.

A harvester.

A processing worker.

A refrigeration technician.

A truck driver.

A marine mechanic.

A boatyard worker.

A wholesaler.

A restaurant employee.

An exporter.

A water-quality technician.

That is the economic chain we have been missing.

The first return is the infrastructure work.

The second return is a healthier productive resource.

The third return can be the businesses that continue using that resource after the construction crews have gone home.

This is where the idea of tenfold growth becomes worth discussing

I do not think we should tell British Columbians that we have proven the entire marine economy can grow tenfold.

We have not.

Starting from almost 100,000 direct marine jobs, tenfold employment would approach the size of a major portion of B.C.’s entire labour force.

That would not be a credible forecast today.

But within individual sectors, growth measured in multiples is a legitimate question.

Shellfish is the clearest example.

B.C. farmed shellfish production is presently worth about $36 million at the farm level. Washington has built a shellfish-aquaculture industry exceeding US$200 million a year.

That does not prove B.C. can duplicate Washington everywhere.

It does demonstrate that our current production is not some obvious natural ceiling.

If selected B.C. growing regions doubled, tripled or in some cases eventually increased production by much larger multiples because sanitary constraints were removed, processing expanded and markets developed, the employment effect would not stop at the beach.

And shellfish is only one part of the picture.

There is seafood processing.

Working harbours.

Vessel construction and repair.

Marine technology.

Tourism.

Surveying.

Ocean robotics.

Commercial diving.

Water-quality monitoring.

Wastewater operations.

Shoreline reclamation.

Marine debris and abandoned-vessel work.

Infrastructure construction.

The point is not to manufacture one giant number.

It is to recognize how many separate businesses can grow around a productive coast.

This is not an argument that B.C. has to abandon oil, gas or mining

Those industries employ British Columbians and contribute to the economy.

The more useful economic discussion is about balance and duration.

A major industrial project can employ thousands of people while it is being constructed and far fewer once it enters operation.

Infrastructure renewal also has construction peaks, but coastal B.C. faces decades of work spread across dozens of communities.

And unlike an extracted mineral or hydrocarbon, shellfish, wild fisheries and other biological resources have the potential to produce again if they are managed sustainably and the habitat supporting them remains productive.

That does not make them free.

Renewable resources still require management, monitoring, infrastructure and restraint.

But the distinction matters.

We can take economic value from a renewable resource without requiring the resource itself to disappear.

Maybe that is the conversation taxpayers need to have

British Columbia already has almost 100,000 direct marine jobs.

We already have billions of dollars of underground infrastructure that needs renewal.

We already know sanitary pollution can close seafood-growing areas.

We already have a neighbouring jurisdiction demonstrating that correcting septic, sewage and runoff problems can reopen shellfish waters and support a substantial shellfish industry.

And we already know that water and wastewater construction itself creates thousands of skilled jobs.

Put those facts together and this stops looking like a choice between “the environment” and “the economy.”

It becomes a much more ordinary economic question.

If we are going to spend billions rebuilding the infrastructure beneath our communities anyway, how much additional economic value can we create by making sure that investment also protects and rebuilds the renewable resources downstream?

That is worth examining before B.C. assumes that its next generation of well-paid resource jobs must come principally from taking something else out of the ground.

The jobs beneath our streets are real.

The jobs on our coast are already real.

The resource is still here.

The question for British Columbians is how much larger that economy could become if we finally connected the three.

References

1. Fisheries and Oceans Canada — Marine Economy GDP and Employment by Province, 2024. B.C. preliminary estimate: 97,560 direct jobs and $8.53 billion in direct GDP. DFO marine economy data

2. Fisheries and Oceans Canada — Marine economy by sector, 2024. Defines activities including seafood, tourism and recreation, transportation and marine construction. DFO marine sectors

3. Environment and Climate Change Canada — Shellfish Water Classification Program. Identifies sewage, septic systems, agricultural runoff and polluted stormwater as sanitary contamination sources. ECCC shellfish water program

4. Washington State Department of Agriculture — Aquaculture. Washington reports more than US$200 million in annual shellfish-aquaculture production. Washington aquaculture overview

5. Puget Sound Partnership — Harvestable shellfish beds. Documents approximately 260,000 acres of growing areas and specific reopening and closure events linked to wastewater, septic systems and pollution control. Puget Sound shellfish indicator

6. Washington Department of Natural Resources — Wild Geoduck Fishery. Reports nearly US$22 million a year in state auction revenue and reinvestment in aquatic habitat. Washington geoduck fishery

7. Fisheries and Oceans Canada / Statistics Canada — Aquaculture Production, 2024. B.C. shellfish production: approximately 9,537 tonnes and $35.96 million in on-site value. DFO aquaculture statistics

8. CRD — Core Area wastewater and inflow/infiltration. Documents leaking pipes, I&I, overflow risks and predicted Clover Point wet-weather overflow duration. CRD wastewater planning

9. VOLWS — Five Councils, a $7-Billion Sewer Bomb—and Our Kids Get the Bill. Working Core Area public-system exposure of approximately $4.8–$4.9 billion and long-term public/private exposure of approximately $5.3–$7 billion. reflections-on-canada-s-2005-wi…

10. VOLWS Core Area renewal calculation. A 25-year program represents approximately $214–$237 million annually under the practical scenario, rising to about $279 million annually at the $7-billion full-renewal scenario. reflections-on-canada-s-2005-wi…

11. Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada — B.C. Clean Water and Wastewater Fund, 2017. $373.2 million of projects were estimated to create close to 4,000 direct and indirect jobs. Canada–B.C. water and wastewater investment

John R Roe

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