Are they coming? – Yukon News

One of the big economic questions of COVID-19 is whether there will be migration from the big cities to places like the Yukon.

It was hard to be locked in an apartment or apartment. The average Toronto apartment is about 750 square feet. Many range up to 500 square feet or smaller. These often have no parking space, no balcony or even a locker for a bicycle.

With the locks lifted, you can commute to work on a tram or subway that holds the same pole as the strangers breathing in your face.

Compare that to the Yukon, where even the tiny, one and a half former government houses are almost twice the size of an apartment in Toronto. Plus a yard, parking lot and usually easy access to a green belt.

According to Remax, a 600-square-foot one-bedroom apartment on Yonge Street with no parking space and no locker was sold for $ 669,000 in late ‘600. You could take this, buy the average house in Whitehorse and have $ 100,000 left.

The work-from-home trend is making moving to the Yukon easier than ever. Many companies have now realized that their employees can work effectively remotely from anywhere. While most big city businesses expect employees to return to work after the pandemic has ended, employees who work from anywhere are at least sometimes open to many.

The Canadian job boards have a wide variety of remote work vacancies, particularly in areas such as technology.

The late but welcome arrival of unlimited internet packages here also helps. As is the fact that our income taxes are lower.

However, cities remain attractive for economic and personal reasons. There’s a reason over 70 percent of Canada’s population lives in a census (CMA – Statistics Canada jargon for a district of at least 100,000 people around a core of at least 50,000 people).

Statistics Canada recently released data suggesting a move is underway. From Canada Day 2019 to the same date in 2020, over 50,000 people moved from Toronto and around 25,000 from Montreal. These are record numbers.

So where did you go? It looks like many have moved to the suburbs or towns next to the big cities. Places like Oshawa, Milton, Brampton, Mirabel, and New Westminster grew rapidly.

However, there is also evidence that city dwellers are moving further away. Halifax, Kelowna and Moncton were among the top 10 fastest growing CMAs. We’ll have to wait for this year’s census to see how cities like Nelson, Canmore, and Squamish are doing. These are lifestyle competitors with Whitehorse for remote workers, and anecdotal evidence suggests they are fine.

Whitehorse isn’t big enough to be a CMA, so it’s not included in the same report as Oshawa and New Westminster. However, a look at other Yukon population data gives some clues. In the first nine months of 2020, roughly equivalent to the pandemic, 240 more people from other parts of Canada moved to the Yukon than the opposite direction.

That is more than 216 net arrivals in the same period last year. But it’s not a huge increase, and most of the newcomers this year came in the first quarter of the year. We actually had a net loss of 26 people from July to September.

So if record numbers of metropolitan Canadians are on the move, why don’t we see a surge in arrivals here?

There are probably several reasons.

One is the lockdown itself. Toronto residents could go to Oshawa to view properties, but were required to isolate themselves for 14 days while on a house hunting trip in the Yukon.

The Yukon also failed to run a major advertising campaign to attract people from the big cities. That would have been gross during the pandemic. But after the pandemic, it might be a good idea.

One of the biggest obstacles could have been our housing shortage. With the steadily growing transfer payment and the steadily growing number of government jobs, property prices in Whitehorse have reached record highs.

The average Whitehorse home was $ 568,900 for the third quarter of 2020. That’s a whopping $ 150,000 from 2016. Whitehorse maisonettes and condos have also increased. Both averaged around $ 415,000 in the third quarter.

This is still dramatically cheaper than in Toronto or Vancouver, but more expensive than the other lifestyle communities we compete with. The numbers aren’t exactly comparable, but the Nelson Star reported that the average home in the Kootenays sold for $ 392,827 in October.

This remote worker with the 600 square foot Toronto apartment could move to Nelson with even more cash in his wallet than if he moved to Whitehorse.

The recent land lottery highlighted our longstanding housing shortage, which our governments have not yet overcome. This time there were 780 applications for only 250 entries.

The housing shortage not only harms Yukon families and makes it difficult for our children to return home to live, but it also appears to discourage distant workers from moving here. These workers are the holy grail of business development agencies. They tend to be highly paid, pay a lot of taxes and spend a lot of money, and have a minimal environmental footprint compared to a resource job.

We’ll see what Statistics Canada’s migration numbers for the final half of 2020 show when they are released. It remains a big question whether urban exodus is a slip or a new long-term trend.

If it’s a trend, it will be a real shame if our skyrocketing house prices draw potential future Yukoners to Nelson instead of here.

Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and author of the MacBride Museum’s Aurore of the Yukon series of historical children’s adventure novels. He is a Ma Murray Award winner for Best Columnist and received Bronze for Outstanding Columnist at the 2019 Canadian Community Newspaper Awards.

Yukonomist

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