LETTER: Changing face of jobs

In response to Helmut Manzl’s last column, The winter of discontent (Feb. 16).

On the well worn litany of Squamish becoming nothing more than an “extended sprawl” of Vancouver, fact is, we should be happy to be within the strong gravitational field of that important Canadian metropolis and have desirable attractants which others within the same radius don’t. 

As to “not enough local jobs,” I am sure it is not just me who knows many people who neither commute daily to the Big City nor to a local address other than to the office-in-home. Whether consultants, designers, software engineers, code writers, marketers and other professionals – yes artists too – many fall into that category and seem to be content with it.

The lines between a “local” and “out of town” job are not as clear anymore in a post-industrial economy as they once were. 

People may migrate here and bring their highly specialized jobs with them while their employer or client remains fixed wherever they are located in the world. 

Sources of income thus become increasingly divorced from the local economy. Ask yourself how the local economic spin-offs of such jobs differ from primary “local” jobs or from those generated by daily commuters. 

Whether we like it or not, the industrial jobs which put this town on the map will not return, no matter how much hand-wringing is done by some. Just look at WLNG – only a fraction of the jobs Woodfibre once provided. They are successively being replaced by the more “invisible” jobs of the knowledge industry, which by the way, is known to benefit from being in the vicinity of large population centres. Don’t forget either the increasing number of retirees moving here and whose retirement spending from sources earned elsewhere also benefits the local economy.

How to manage rapid urban growth and the complex issues such growth generates is a legitimate concern and could at some point also necessitate an examination of a municipal tax regime based on the realities of another time. However, the lament “Jobs before Growth” may have been suitable for an economy based on resource extraction or harvesting, but not anymore for one tied into the world at large.

Wolfgang Wittenburg

Squamish