Editor:
In a letter published in your Aug. 21 edition “How would New Prosperity create 70K jobs?” contributor Pat Teti poses a question about how we arrived at our conclusions about the employment potential of the New Prosperity Gold-Copper Project.
The employment potential of New Prosperity comes from a 2011 report developed by the Centre for Spatial Economics (C4SE), a firm who has previously developed fiscal forecasts for the Canadian Department of Finance.
In the New Prosperity C4SE report, a macroeconomic approach is taken in which the cumulative impacts of the project are projected over the course of the mine’s 20-year operation life.
It is a comprehensive estimate of the economic and fiscal impact of the project’s development.
New Prosperity will contribute $11 billion to British Columbia’s Real GDP.
Based on that significant contribution to our provincial economy, an analysis of increased employment considered not just the number of jobs directly created by the mine itself, but also the jobs created by economic growth in B.C., stimulated by New Prosperity, over the course of two decades.
The report indicates that “the increase in GDP leads to an average annual difference in employment of three thousand.
“On a full-time equivalent basis, the cumulative difference of 71 thousand workers represents about 57 thousand person years of employment added to the economy.
This additional amount suggests that for every one person year of employment created directly by New Prosperity an additional five person years of employment are created in the province.”
Reports, such as this, are very beneficial in helping to put into perspective exactly what is at stake for our province with the advancement of the New Prosperity Gold-Copper Project.
The positive impacts of the project reach far beyond the number of employees that will work at the mine.
Readers who wish to learn more about the New Prosperity Gold-Copper are encouraged to visit newprosperityproject.ca
Sincerely,
Brian Battison,
VP Corporate Affairs,
Taseko Mines