By Abigail Popple, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, RMG
Last week, Northern Development Initiative Trust (NDIT) announced the launch of the Northern Economic Dependency Dashboard. The dashboard is a data visualization tool presenting statistics on economic dependency – that is, how much a given area relies on a specific industry for employment opportunities and revenue.
The dashboard for northern B.C. was launched in conjunction with dashboards for the Southern Interior, as well as Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast, financed by the Economic Trust of the Southern Interior and Island Coastal Economic Trust, respectively.
In an interview with The Goat, NDIT CEO Joel McKay said he hopes local governments use the dashboard to help their economic development research.
“A data set showing at a really local level what our economic dependencies are is important when we’re talking about how reliant a community like Valemount or McBride is on a particular industry,” McKay said. “For those of us in economic development, if we’re trying to understand the opportunities in a particular sector or if we’re trying to advocate for investment in our community, that data is really powerful.”
The dashboard includes statistics from regional districts as well as municipalities, McKay said. And thanks to the dashboards produced by NDIT’s sister organizations, similar data is available for every community in B.C.
“When we think about helping a particular community, we might ask, ‘How many communities are in a similar situation in our region?’ And now we actually have the data to back it up, and that can inform policy and program development for an organization like The Trust,” he said.
The data is sourced from statistics provided by the provincial government, as well as findings from the 2016 and 2021 census conducted by Statistics Canada, according to McKay.
“It was a coordinated effort, and the thank-you really goes to the Southern Interior Trust for taking the lead on this,” McKay said of the project. “It’s a concerted effort to try and put more data out there in the hands of economic development community leaders and see if it supports better decision making.”
