Canada Talk » Quebec City on a roll

hier was positives für alle Quebec Freunde:

Quebec City on a roll

Economic powerhouse boasts Canada's lowest jobless rate


Steve Couture, president of computer game maker Frima Studios, employs more than 250 software developers in Quebec City.

Steve Couture, president of computer game maker Frima Studios, employs more than 250 software developers in Quebec City.
Photograph by: Francis Vachon, The Gazette

It isn't the fact that his hometown has posted the lowest jobless rate among big cities in Canada for a second consecutive month that most pleases Yvon Charest.

What really tickles him pink is the fact that movers and shakers in arch-rival Montreal have suddenly taken notice of the stunning economic performance of the once-dowdy provincial capital.

"People in Montreal never used to care about what was happening here," said Charest, president and chief executive of Industrial Alliance, one of the 11 national insurance and banking institutions that have their headquarters here.

"But now they're asking us questions, trying to figure out how we've managed to do so well."

Long considered a bureaucratic backwater that survived mostly on government jobs and tourism, this picture-perfect city has emerged from a generation-long metamorphosis as a hip hot spot with a diverse and vibrant economy.

The most recent proof came a week ago, when Statistics Canada reported that Quebec City had a Canada-low 4.1- per-cent unemployment rate in February.

That was 0.2 of a percentage point lower than second-place Saskatoon and 0.4 of a percentage point lower than the previous month, when Quebec City led the nation for the first time since StatsCan started tracking the unemployment numbers of major urban centres in 1987.

For its part, Montreal's jobless rate in February was more than two times higher than Quebec's at 9.2 per cent, up 0.1 of a percentage point from January.

Quebec City's employment performance is even more dramatic when you consider that the two biggest private employers in the region 20 years ago - the Daishowa Forest Products Ltd. pulp and paper plant and the MIL Davie shipyard, which was then building ships for the Canadian navy at its facility in Lévis - have both sought court protection from their creditors in 2010.

The public sector - including provincial government ministries, hospitals, research facilities, vocational schools, technical colleges, specialized institutes and, in particular, Université Laval, which is North America's first and foremost francophone university with 17 faculties, 350 programs and more than 1,200 researchers - remains by far the region's biggest job provider.

However, several sectors, including insurance and financial services, high-tech firms, pharmaceutical and health-care companies - many of them spinoffs from government-funded research facilities - professional services, real estate, tourism, retail and light manufacturing are all employing thousands of area residents.

"Quebec City has an extremely diversified economy, and there is solid growth in every sector," said Stephen Gordon, a Université Laval economist.

According to Gordon, la Vieille Capitale went through tough times in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the North American Free Trade Agreement and the recession combined to gut the heavy manufacturing businesses on which the city had traditionally relied.

As a result, Quebec City became an economic basket case that was saddled with chronic double-digit rates of unemployment.

"It forced a restructuring and specialization in several sectors, which lowered the dependence on government and on any one sector like oil and gas or agriculture or the auto industry," Gordon said. "Those economies are vulnerable in that, when the U.S. or the world market tanks, so do they."

Three of the sectors Quebec City invested most heavily in - software development, life sciences and high-tech processed materials like defence-related optics - enjoyed rapid growth over the past decade and were relatively unscathed during the recession.

"Those sectors have done very well and others are also doing well or are feeding off the growth of local affluence," Gordon noted. "I don't know if it was good planning or good luck."

Carl Viel, the CEO of Pôle Québec-Chaudière-Appalaches, the region's government- and business-supported economic development agency, thinks it's a mix of both good luck and good planning - together with a dash of Québécois savoir faire, hometown pride and the advantage of being in a small city with a world-class outlook and a tightly woven social fabric.

Speaking last week from Cannes, France, where he was attending MIPIM, the world's biggest real estate trade show, Viel said: "The key to our success today lies in the decisions taken several years ago by government and some passionate local business leaders to focus investment efforts on a few sectors in which we could compete provincially, nationally and internationally.

"Those sectors have added a whole new dimension to Quebec City's economy."

That success, together with the hoopla created by the year-long, $100-million party for Quebec City's 400th birthday in 2008, have created an infectious can-do attitude within the city's business community.

"The mood is a lot more positive now than it was when I was growing up," said Steve Couture, the 34-year-old founder and president of Frima Studios.

A start-up that sprang to life in 2003 in the city's once-seedy St. Roch neighbourhood, thanks to the province's generous income-tax-credit program for the software sector, Frima is a Canadian pioneer in interactive gaming on the Web and one of several video-game companies that have made it big here.

Today, the company employs more than 250 developers. In 2009, it was rated the top video-game maker in Quebec by Profit magazine, and the 10th fastest-growing company in Canada.

A decade ago, when he was teaching video-game programming at a local vocational school, Couture said his best students "always left right away for Montreal."

He turned down what he called "a dream job" in Los Angeles with Time-Warner to open Frima.

"I really wanted to build a company that would help to keep them here," he recalled. "I knew that we had the creative people and the computer programmers here to make it work."

The growth of the gaming industry in Quebec City enabled Couture's company to recruit people from around the world - including anglophones from other areas of Canada, he said.

"The fact that Quebec City is French-speaking is not a constraint," Couture said.

"If anything, it's an added attraction in our industry, which is made up of mostly young people who are curious and artistic."

Small manufacturing companies that provide goods for the salary-rich local market are also doing well.

"Business has been booming," said Mathieu Simard, a third-generation owner and the general manager of Simard Cuisine et Salle de Bain, which makes high-end custom kitchens and bathrooms at its facility in St. Tite des Caps, 50 kilometres east of the provincial capital.

According to Simard, the company his grandfather started 40 years ago was doing less than $1 million in sales a decade ago. This year, it will do more than $6 million.

"There are lots of people in Quebec City now who can spend between $10,000 and $25,000 on kitchen cabinets," Simard told The Gazette.

The result, he added, is more than 50 jobs for local people and extra money to invest in worthy local causes, like minor hockey and baseball.

For Industrial Alliance CEO Charest, the many mergers and consolidations that happened within the insurance and financial services sector across the province in the 1990s are a big reason for his city's economic renaissance.

As with Desjardins, which bought Montreal's Laurentian Life and moved its operations to its headquarters in Lévis, Industrial established itself here after merging with Montreal's Alliance in 1987.

Since then, Industrial Alliance's workforce in the Quebec City area has grown from 600 to more than 1,500.

"Quebec City has been a big winner," said Charest, whose company employs 3,000 people across Canada and the U.S., and boasts assets worth some $58 billion.

Notably, he compares the city's economic strength and vitality to Waterloo, Ont., for three reasons: the presence and stability of insurance and financial services; the dynamism of new high-tech businesses; and the close link between the business community and Université Laval.

The big challenge now, Charest said, is to attract enough English-speaking employees to support expansion outside Quebec, which already accounts for 36 per cent of the business being done by the 11 insurance and financial-services companies headquartered here.

Regrouped for the past three years under the Pôle-managed Accord program, which brings together industry leaders in several sectors, those 11 firms are developing common initiatives to meet that English-language shortfall. One of those, which Charest said will be launched in the coming days, will be an Internet-based, English-language course for all 11,000 employees in the insurance/financial services sector in the region.

"The bottom line," said Charest, "is that when everyone works together, everybody wins."

montreal gazette

Schön, gute Nachrichten aus Quebec höre ich immer gern. Was die Beschäftigungslage anbetrifft, sind ein paar hundert neue Stellen aus der Privatindustrie wohl zuwenig. Es ist in erster Line die öffentliche Hand, die Neustellen produziert. Das könnte sich aber (bald) - hallo Budgetdefizit - ändern.

Quebec scheint zur Zeit nicht gerade die Wirtschaftslokomotive zu sein. http://www.conferenceboard.ca/documents.aspx?did=3462

Bottom line ist: Die Wirtschaft scheint zur Zeit wieder etwas an Dynanmik zu gewinnen, Stimuluspaket sei dank. Bald ist aber fertig stimuliert und ob dann die Wirtschaft weiter anzieht, ist ein andere Frage. Sicher ist: Die Beschäftigungslage wird sich nur zögerlich verbessern - wohl auch in Quebec.

Bonne soirée

tomaha

Ich glaub vor 2012/2013 wird es mit einem merkbaren Aufschwung nichts mehr drüben werden.. Solange die USA weiter am röcheln sind liegt Kanada eh am Boden .. Erstmal kommt noch der Gewerbeimmo Crash in den USA und danach mal geht es ggf wieder etwas nach oben .. Und wenn der Can Dollar weiter so nach oben geht dann seh ich für die Tourismus Industrie in Canada auch noch schwarz .. Alles Mist zur Zeit weltweit ..

Hallo,
wenn ich den Artikel richtig überflogen habe, geht es in diesem nur um Quebec City und nicht um ganz Kanada oder ganz Quebec!
Und in Kanada gehen die Arbeitslosenzahlen ja wieder zurück, in D nicht und 2011 wie in Deutschen Medien berichtet wird soll Kanada Wirtschaft um über 3 Prozent wachsen, in Deutschland sieht es da wieder anders.
Aber insgesamt sieht es durch die Krise überall schlecht aus, egal welches Land man sich anguckt!!