{"id":838570,"date":"2026-07-31T17:10:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T17:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/838570\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T17:10:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T17:10:14","slug":"vancouver-the-resource-economy-you-cant-see-canadian-energy-news-top-headlines-commentaries-features-events","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/838570\/","title":{"rendered":"VANCOUVER &#8211; The Resource Economy You Can&#8217;t See &#8211; Canadian Energy News, Top Headlines, Commentaries, Features &#038; Events"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By <a href=\"https:\/\/resourceworks.com\/author\/stewart-muir\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Stewart Muir<\/a>\n<\/p>\n<p>How Metro Vancouver became the head office, the trading floor and the export gateway of a resource economy it has stopped recognising\u2014and why the city\u2019s own crest has been telling the story all along.<\/p>\n<p><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-604726\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Vancouver-City-Coat-of-Arms-1200x810-1-1024x691.png\" alt=\"vancouver city coat of arms 1200x810\" width=\"1024\" height=\"691\"  \/>\n<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">In 1969 the City of Vancouver was granted a coat of arms. A logger and a fisherman hold up the shield. A ship crowns it. The sea runs through the middle. Image by Jack Ryan Morris \u2013 Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=93662558\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=93662558<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Get the Latest Canadian Focused Energy News Delivered to You! It&#8217;s FREE:  <a class=\"gofollow\" data-track=\"ODAwLDE1LDM2MDA=\" href=\"https:\/\/energynow.com\/email-signup\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Quick Sign-Up Here<\/a><\/p>\n<p>There is not a single working mine, oil well or pulp mill inside the City of Vancouver. And yet Metro Vancouver is one of the most important places on earth for natural resources\u2014the head office, the trading floor and the export gateway for what the rest of the province and the country digs, cuts, pumps and grows. This is the story of how a resource economy hides in plain sight, in a region that believes it has moved on\u2014and of how much of it has been built in the last two years alone.\n<\/p>\n<p>The argument in brief<\/p>\n<p>Metro Vancouver looks like a post-industrial economy of real estate, technology and tourism. It is also a resource economy\u2014one that wears a suit instead of a hard hat.<br \/>\nFour roles define it: the gateway (the Port of Vancouver, a national asset moving mostly resources), the build-out (new oil, gas and electricity capacity being built right now), the brain (a global cluster of mining finance) and the base (the resource revenue that helps fund the province\u2019s public services).<br \/>\nThe numbers are not small. The port enables\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.portvancouver.com\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">roughly $365 billion in trade a year<\/a>. Crude shipped through B.C. in the first year of the Trans Mountain expansion was worth nearly $13.9 billion. BC Hydro, run from downtown, is spending nearly $36 billion to rebuild the grid. Close to 1,000 mining and exploration companies, worth about $449 billion, are run from the region. Resource industries supply roughly three-quarters of B.C.\u2019s goods exports. And when that economy grows, most of the new jobs are created here: 55 per cent of them in Metro Vancouver and the Lower Mainland.<br \/>\nNone of this needs a mine within city limits. That is the point\u2014and the reason the region so often misreads its own economy. Its own 1969 coat of arms reads it correctly: a logger, a fisherman, a ship and the sea.<\/p>\n<p>The gateway<\/p>\n<p>A national asset that happens to sit here Start with the most physical fact of all. Almost everything western Canada pulls out of the ground or off the land has to reach the ocean somewhere\u2014and most of it reaches the ocean here.\n<\/p>\n<p>The Port of Vancouver is the largest port in Canada and the largest by cargo volume on the west coast of the Americas. In 2025 it moved a record 170 million tonnes of cargo. It trades with\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.canada.ca\/en\/one-canadian-economy\/news\/2026\/07\/canada-to-diversify-trade-and-double-exports-through-the-port-of-vancouver-gateway-strategy.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">170 economies<\/a>\u00a0and enables on the order of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.canada.ca\/en\/one-canadian-economy\/news\/2026\/07\/canada-to-diversify-trade-and-double-exports-through-the-port-of-vancouver-gateway-strategy.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">$365 billion in goods every year<\/a>\u2014moving almost as much by volume as Canada\u2019s next five largest ports combined. It is important to be clear about whose port this is. The Port of Vancouver is federal infrastructure, governed by a federal authority, and it exists for the benefit of the whole country and its resource industries. Most of what it ships is produced far from the Lower Mainland\u2014the coal of the Elk Valley, the grain and potash of the Prairies, the crude of the Alberta oil sands, the forest products of the B.C. interior. Metro Vancouver is not the owner of this wealth so much as its gateway: the place where a nation\u2019s resources meet tidewater and the world.\n<\/p>\n<p>That role still lands heavily in the regional economy. An economic impact study prepared for the port authority by the Vancouver consultancy InterVISTAS found that port operations and their supply chains support more than 132,000 jobs across Canada, pay $9.3 billion in wages and add $16.3 billion to GDP. The terminals, railways, trucking, longshore work and marine services that do this work sit largely in Metro Vancouver. Take the resources out of the port and you do not get a smaller port\u2014you get almost no port at all.\n<\/p>\n<p>The build-out: The newest chapter is being poured right now<\/p>\n<p>The resource economy here is not a legacy or a museum piece. It is being expanded in steel and concrete on the region\u2019s waterfront, and the last two years have reshaped it more than the previous twenty.\n<\/p>\n<p>Oil: two years of Trans Mountain\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In May 2024, after a decade of fighting and roughly $34 billion in cost, the Trans Mountain expansion opened. It nearly tripled the capacity of the only pipeline connecting the Alberta oil sands to the West Coast, and it ends at the Westridge Marine Terminal in Burnaby\u2014inside Metro Vancouver.\n<\/p>\n<p>What two years did is striking. Statistics Canada found that in the first year of operation, crude movements from Alberta to B.C. rose more than fivefold, and the volume of crude exported through B.C. surged more than sixfold. The Canada Energy Regulator reports that Westridge can now load up to 630,000 barrels of crude a day, up from about 79,000 before the expansion. Where a handful of tankers once called each month, roughly one now loads every day or two.\n<\/p>\n<p>The value is real and new. Crude oil shipped through British Columbia was worth nearly $13.9 billion in that first year alone\u2014a trade category that barely existed before. At the Port of Vancouver, liquid-bulk tonnage jumped 54 per cent in 2025, with crude exports up 95 per cent. The federally owned\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.transmountain.com\/news\/trans-mountain-reports-q4-2025-and-full-year-2025-results\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">pipeline returned about $1.7 billion to the Government of Canada<\/a>\u00a0last year.\n<\/p>\n<p>Most of that value belongs to the producers in Alberta and to the federal owner, not to Vancouver. But the region captures the marine economy the project created and concentrated in its harbour: the terminal operations at Westridge, the B.C. Coast Pilots who board every tanker, the tug-escort fleets that shepherd them through the First and Second Narrows, the spill response capacity, the Burnaby refinery, the line supplies, and the port activity itself. A multi-billion-dollar export flow now runs through the city\u2019s inlet that did not exist two years ago\u2014most of it bound for the U.S. West Coast and, increasingly, Asia. The Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada frames this plainly: Trans Mountain is Canada\u2019s first real step toward diversifying its oil exports beyond the United States and into the Indo-Pacific\u2014a national trade pivot executed through Metro Vancouver\u2019s harbour. It is not without friction: the tolls are high and disputed, the tanker route through a crowded urban harbour is tight, and critics warned about spill risk in a dense inlet.\n<\/p>\n<p>$13.9B the value of crude oil shipped through B.C. in the first year of the Trans Mountain expansion alone\u2014a flow that scarcely existed before 2024, now passing through Metro Vancouver\u2019s harbour.\n<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-604727\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Slide1-1024x576.jpeg\" alt=\"slide1\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\"  \/>\n<\/p>\n<p>Gas: the overlooked LNG story\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>If two years of oil is the visible build-out, liquefied natural gas is the one hiding in plain sight\u2014arguably the most overlooked economic story on the coast. LNG is simply natural gas chilled to a liquid so it can travel the world by ship, and the region now sits at the centre of a build-out worth billions, with First Nations as governing partners rather than bystanders.\n<\/p>\n<p>On Howe Sound near Squamish, on the region\u2019s doorstep, Woodfibre LNG is rising on a former pulp-mill site at swiyat, in Squamish Nation territory. It is a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/vancouversun.com\/news\/local-news\/woodfibre-lng-construction-countdown\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">roughly $12.3-billion export plant<\/a>\u00a0designed to produce 2.1 million tonnes of LNG a year, all of it contracted to BP for 15 years. As of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/vancouversun.com\/news\/local-news\/woodfibre-lng-construction-countdown\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">mid 2026 it was about 70% built<\/a>, with first production expected in 2027, and its developer bills it as the world\u2019s first net-zero LNG facility. Notably, the Squamish Nation conducts its own environmental oversight of the project under 13 legally binding conditions\u2014a landmark of Indigenous-led regulation.\n<\/p>\n<p>Feeding it is a second project rooted in Metro Vancouver. FortisBC\u2019s Eagle Mountain\u2014Woodfibre gas pipeline runs roughly 47 kilometres from north of the Coquitlam watershed, inside Metro Vancouver, to the Woodfibre site\u2014including a nine-kilometre tunnel bored beneath the Squamish estuary to limit its footprint. It is regulated under its own agreement with the Squamish Nation, and it is a substantial employer: the pipeline contractor alone reported more than 450 workers at peak, and together Woodfibre and its pipeline represent thousands of construction jobs, with a stated priority on hiring local and Indigenous workers.\n<\/p>\n<p>Closer in, FortisBC\u2019s Tilbury LNG facility sits squarely inside Metro Vancouver, on the Fraser River in Delta. It is expanding\u2014additional liquefaction now, with a proposed second phase that would roughly triple its storage\u2014and in July 2024 the Tilbury jetty project won approval to build a marine terminal on the south arm of the Fraser, opening the plant to ships. That jetty is the key to a second role: marine bunkering. Tilbury is positioning the region as a West Coast hub for supplying LNG as a lower-carbon marine fuel to vessels in the harbour, with bunkering set to scale up around 2027. The port, in other words, is starting not only to ship the country\u2019s gas but to refuel the world\u2019s ships with it.\n<\/p>\n<p>Power: the electricity build-out\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>None of this\u2014not the electrified LNG plants, not the mines, not the growing port\u2014runs without power, and the company building that power is headquartered downtown. BC Hydro, the provincial Crown corporation run from a tower in central Vancouver, is in the middle of what it calls its biggest build-out since the 1960s:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bchydro.com\/about\/strategies-plans-regulatory\/supply-operations\/clean-energy-action-plan.html?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">a 10-year capital plan of nearly $36 billion to rebuild and expand the province\u2019s electricity system<\/a>, a roughly 50 per cent increase over its previous plan.\n<\/p>\n<p>The scale is easy to miss because it is spread across the province, but the command and much of the spending run from Vancouver. The plan is forecast to support 10,500 to 12,500 jobs a year, on average, over the decade. Critical in this was the completion of the Site C dam, reinforcing transmission into a growing Burnaby and South Fraser, and adding new clean generation through \u201ccalls for power\u201d in which First Nations hold majority equity\u2014more than $2 billion of First Nations ownership in the latest round alone. And a large part of its purpose is to electrify the resource economy itself: the mines of the north coast, the LNG plants on the water, the trucks and ships and port that move the goods. Even the clean-energy transition is being managed from Metro Vancouver\u2014and much of it exists to power what the province digs, ships and builds.\n<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-604728\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Slide2-1024x576.jpeg\" alt=\"slide2\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\"  \/>\n<\/p>\n<p>The throughline across all three\u2014oil, gas and power\u2014is the tell. The region\u2019s newest and lowest-carbon energy ambitions are resource ambitions, run from and landing in Metro Vancouver, with First Nations as partners and owners. The next chapter of the resource economy is being built on the city\u2019s water and wired from its towers right now.\n<\/p>\n<p>The brain<br \/>\nA global capital that mines nothing locally\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>If the port is where resources leave, the towers of downtown Vancouver are where decisions about resources are made\u2014for projects on the other side of the world. The city has been a centre of mining money for more than a century. The Vancouver Stock Exchange, incorporated in 1906 was built on mineral speculation. After a run of scandals, it merged with the Alberta Stock Exchange in 1999 to form the Canadian Venture Exchange. The Toronto Stock Exchange acquired it in 2001, and it was renamed the TSX Venture Exchange in 2002 . What outlived the exchange was the ecosystem around it\u2014a dense cluster of geologists, financiers, securities lawyers, promoters and engineers packed into a few blocks of downtown office buildings.\n<\/p>\n<p>Today that cluster is, by one common measure, the largest of its kind anywhere. Industry counts put close to 1,000 mining and exploration companies in greater Vancouver\u2013more, on that measure, than Toronto and Perth, the next two contenders, combined. The Mining Association of BC values\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/mining.bc.ca\/2026\/05\/metro-vancouver-a-global-hub-for-mining-activity\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the companies headquartered in Metro Vancouver and on Vancouver Island at a combined $449 billion<\/a>. Business in Vancouver sums it up neatly: London is the capital of the world\u2019s biggest mining companies, and Vancouver is the global capital of the \u201cjuniors\u201d\u2013the small exploration firms that find the deposits the giants later buy. A large share of the world\u2019s publicly listed mining companies, by various counts 40 per cent or more, trade on Toronto\u2019s two exchanges, and Vancouver houses the densest concentration of the exploration firms behind them.\n<\/p>\n<p>Here is the twist that makes the point. Almost none of these companies mine anything in British Columbia. Of the ten largest by market value headquartered in the city, essentially one\u2014Teck Resources\u2014actually operates mines in the province. The rest run projects in Chile, Argentina, Mali, Nevada, Botswana, the Yukon. The chief executive of one Vancouverlisted explorer described the arrangement with unusual candour to a reporter for Inside Climate News.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe money flows into Vancouver, and then we geologists spend it\u2014in Alaska, in Mongolia, all over the world.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<p>Mining executive, To Inside Climate News, 2025<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"gofollow\" data-track=\"ODQzLDcsMzYwMA==\" href=\"https:\/\/jenikfreight.com\/\" rel=\"sponsored nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"GLJ\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Jenik-Freight-Desktop-Banner-1400x179-V3-March-11-2026.png\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>That is what a command centre looks like. The city\u2019s export is not ore. It is capital, expertise and decisions\u2014and they travel to wherever in the world the rock happens to be.\n<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-604729\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Slide4-1024x576.jpeg\" alt=\"slide4\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\"  \/>\n<\/p>\n<p>The cluster<br \/>\nThe jobs, and the space, that never look like mining\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>A command centre needs people, and the resource economy employs a great many of them in Metro Vancouver\u2014most of whom never set foot on a mine site.\n<\/p>\n<p>Run down the disciplines the sector draws on and it reads like a directory of the downtown core: engineering, geoscience, finance, law, accounting, environmental science, chemistry, software. The Mining Association of BC\u2019s own regional study found that mining supports more than\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/mining.bc.ca\/2026\/05\/metro-vancouver-a-global-hub-for-mining-activity\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">12,300 jobs and over $3.5 billion in annual economic activity<\/a>\u00a0across Metro Vancouver and Vancouver Island\u2013a region with no operating mines, yet one that accounts for a fifth of the entire sector\u2019s economic footprint. Forestry tells a similar story: about a quarter of B.C.\u2019s roughly\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/cofi.org\/new-study-confirms-forestry-remains-a-foundational-pillar-of-b-c-s-economy\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">100,000 forest-sector jobs<\/a>, some 26,000, are based in the Lower Mainland and Southwest, clustered around the head offices, suppliers and ports rather than the cutblocks. Even natural gas, produced 1,000 kilometres to the northeast, runs a supply chain through the city\u2013Vancouver firms billed more than half a billion dollars in goods and services to gas development between 2018 and 2024.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIncreasingly, mining is to Vancouver what oil and gas is to Calgary.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<p>Michael Goehring, Mining Association of BC, 2026<\/p>\n<p>The footprint in the city\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>All of this takes up physical space\u2014though, like the economy itself, in a way that hides in plain sight. Walk the financial core and the towers along West Hastings, Howe, Burrard and Georgia house the mining houses, the securities lawyers, the engineering and geoscience firms. Yet the commercial brokers who track that market describe downtown office demand as \u201cwell diversified\u2014business services, engineers, legal and tech,\u201d with no single industry dominating. Mining and energy firms are folded into those professional-services categories rather than counted on their own. Many of the region\u2019s roughly 1,000 exploration companies hold small or even shared and virtual offices\u2014a registered address and a phone line on West Hastings while the geologists are in the field\u2014so the cluster\u2019s footprint is systematically under-counted in the leasing statistics even as it fills the calendars of the city\u2019s lawyers, accountants and engineers.\n<\/p>\n<p>The resource economy\u2019s other footprint is industrial. The terminals, rail yards, warehouses and transload sites that serve the port consume some of the scarcest and most expensive industrial land in North America. Port and resource logistics is one of the largest claimants on that land, and the competition for it\u2014among housing, the port and industry\u2014is one of the region\u2019s defining planning tensions. You cannot easily read the resource economy off a vacancy report, because it is spread across professional services tenancies, small offices and industrial logistics rather than labelled \u201cmining\u201d or \u201cenergy.\u201d Its footprint, like its output, is real but camouflaged.\n<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-604730\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Slide6-1024x576.jpeg\" alt=\"slide6\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\"  \/>\n<\/p>\n<p>The base<br \/>\nWhat pays for the glass towers\u2014and the hospitals\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Behind the port, the build-out and the cluster sits a deeper and older idea\u2014the one that explains why a city of condos should care about a copper mine 1,000 kilometres away.\n<\/p>\n<p>The Canadian economist Harold Innis gave it a name almost a century ago: the staples thesis. His argument was that Canada grew by extracting raw materials\u2014fur, fish, timber, minerals, grain\u2014and shipping them to larger economies, and that this trade shaped everything else, from where cities rose to how wealth moved through them. The relationship it produced was between a \u201cmetropolis,\u201d which organised, financed and shipped the staples, and a \u201chinterland,\u201d which produced them. Vancouver is the textbook metropolis.\n<\/p>\n<p>The economic geographers Roger Hayter, of Simon Fraser University, and Trevor Barnes, of the University of British Columbia, spent careers mapping precisely this\u2014how British Columbia\u2019s resource economy is run from its largest city even though the resources come from everywhere but the city.\n<\/p>\n<p>Translated into today\u2019s numbers, the idea holds. A study by Philip Cross, a former chief economic analyst at Statistics Canada, found that natural resources and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.fraserinstitute.org\/studies\/role-natural-resources-british-columbias-economy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.fraserinstitute.org\/studies\/role-natural-resources-british-columbias-economy\">the activities directly tied to them make up about 11 per cent of B.C.\u2019s GDP,<\/a>\u00a0and that resource industries supply roughly three-quarters of the province\u2019s goods exports. An analysis commissioned by the provincial government went further, estimating that resource-related activity accounts for more than half of B.C.\u2019s \u201ceconomic base\u201d\u2014the export earnings that bring outside dollars into the province and then circulate through every caf\u00e9, clinic and condo sale that follows. The same economist made the regional point most sharply in Resource Works\u2019 own High Impact study: a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/resourceworks.com\/high_impact_report\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">10 per cent increase in B.C.\u2019s natural-resource output would generate more than 39,000 new jobs across the province\u2014and 55 per cent of them would be created in Metro Vancouver and the Lower Mainland<\/a>. The resources come from the hinterland; the jobs they create, more often than not, land in the city.\n<\/p>\n<p>Argued over, line by line\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This is not an abstract claim. It is fought over every year in the province\u2019s budget process. Under the Budget Transparency and Accountability Act, an all-party committee of the Legislature\u2014the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services\u2014holds a public consultation and reports recommendations for the next budget. Resource industries are perennial participants. In\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/resourceworks.com\/resource-development-must-anchor-b-c-s-2027-budget\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">June 2026, Resource Works itself presented to the committee<\/a>, arguing that energy, mining and forestry are \u201cthe indispensable foundation for fiscal stability, job creation, and the public services,\u201d and that without the tens of billions in resource exports and the revenue they generate, \u201cthe math on hospitals, schools, and infrastructure simply does not add up.\u201d The province has been acting on that case: Budget 2026 put more than $40 million over three years into faster permitting, mineral-exploration permits rose nearly 35 per cent in 2025 over 2024, and timelines for major mine applications have fallen about 35 per cent since 2019.\n<\/p>\n<p>The accountants make the same point in their own idiom. The Chartered Professional Accountants of British Columbia, in their annual\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bccpa.ca\/news-events\/bc-check-up\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">BC Check-Up reports, classify forestry, fishing, mining, oil and gas together as \u201cnatural resources,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0track their weight in the economy, and warn that B.C.\u2019s exposure to U.S. tariffs on softwood lumber, metals and energy is a direct economic risk\u2014urging the province to diversify both its trading partners and its economy.\n<\/p>\n<p>The trade analysts extend the logic outward, casting the new tidewater access at the region\u2019s port as Canada\u2019s chance to swing resource exports toward Asia. The throughline is consistent across the accountants, the committee room and the think tanks: the resource economy is a major source of the public revenue that pays for the province\u2019s hospitals and schools\u2014including the city\u2019s. The glass-tower economy and the services that support it are, in part, underwritten by what the province digs, cuts and pumps.\n<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-604731\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Slide7-1024x576.jpeg\" alt=\"slide7\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\"  \/>\n<\/p>\n<p>The other story<br \/>\nWhere this account has to be fair\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>None of this is the whole truth, and an honest report has to say so plainly.\n<\/p>\n<p>There is a strong, well-evidenced case that Metro Vancouver has genuinely changed. The resource sector\u2019s share of the provincial economy has shrunk over decades\u2014not because resources collapsed, but because real estate, finance, technology and services grew so much faster. Scholars such as Thomas Hutton and Trevor Barnes have documented Vancouver\u2019s rise as a \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/10.1177\/0042098009103863\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">new economy<\/a>\u201d city of design, film, software and creative work, layered over and partly replacing its old industrial waterfront. For most residents, the region\u2019s defining economic story is not coal or copper. It is the price of housing.\n<\/p>\n<p>The finance cluster has a shadow side, too. The same downtown that insiders call a \u201ccentre of excellence\u201d has long been known, less admiringly, as Howe Street\u2014a market whose junior-mining listings have produced as many cautionary tales as discoveries. Investigative journalists and academics, from The Narwhal to Inside Climate News to the scholar Alain Deneault, have documented how loose disclosure rules and generous tax incentives can tip exploration finance from genuine risk-taking into speculation. Critical research groups, including the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and its Corporate Mapping Project, argue that the sector\u2019s economic weight also buys it outsized political influence in the province.\n<\/p>\n<p>So the honest synthesis is not that Vancouver is secretly a mining town. It is that the region is two economies at once\u2014a postindustrial metropolis and a resource command centre\u2014and that the second is consistently underweighted in how the first understands itself. The risk is not in celebrating the new economy. It is in writing policy as though the old one had vanished, when the port\u2019s record tonnage, the new oil in the harbour and the downtown towers full of geologists say otherwise.\n<\/p>\n<p>Why it matters<\/p>\n<p>Seeing the economy you actually have.\n<\/p>\n<p>Why press the point? Because places make decisions about things they can see, and Metro Vancouver has trained itself not to see this one.\n<\/p>\n<p>When the region debates a pipeline, a port expansion, a mine permit or an LNG terminal, it tends to frame the question as someone else\u2019s industry being imposed on an urban, post-resource public. The evidence points the other way. These are, in large measure, Metro Vancouver\u2019s own industries\u2014its jobs, its head offices, its export earnings, its tax base, the revenue behind its public services. The roughly $365 billion that crosses the port, the new $13.9 billion in crude through the harbour, the $36 billion BC Hydro is spending to power it all, the $449 billion in companies run from downtown, the three-quarters of provincial exports and the 55 per cent of resource-driven job growth that lands in the Lower Mainland do not belong to the hinterland alone. They are the quiet foundation beneath the visible city.\n<\/p>\n<p>There is real opportunity in seeing this clearly. As the world scrambles for critical minerals, low-carbon metals, responsibly produced energy and reliable food, the very things Metro Vancouver already organises, finances and ships are in rising demand. The concentration of expertise downtown is a genuine, hard-to-replicate competitive advantage\u2014the sort other cities would pay dearly to build from scratch. The first step to using it well is admitting that it is there. The city said as much in 1969, when it put a logger and a fisherman on its coat of arms, set a ship above them and the sea between them, and chose the motto it still carries.\n<\/p>\n<p>Metro Vancouver is a resource city. The mines are just somewhere else.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n<p>Stewart Muir is the President and CEO of Resource Works Society.<\/p>\n<p>Share This:  <\/p>\n<p>            More News Articles<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Stewart Muir How Metro Vancouver became the head office, the trading floor and the export gateway of&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":838571,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194298],"tags":[49,48,55],"class_list":["post-838570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-vancouver","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-vancouver"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=838570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/838571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=838570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=838570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=838570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}