North's CMAs Sluggish When it Comes to Building Permits

The June 2017 building permit numbers from Statistics Canada are out today and they show that the total value of building permits rose in six provinces in June, led by Quebec and Manitoba. Meanwhile, permits were up in 14 of 36 census metropolitan areas (CMAs), led by Toronto, Montréal and Winnipeg with Hamilton reporting the largest decline in June (-60.0%).

The year to year results (June 2016 to June 2017) are shown in the accompanying figure for Canada's CMAs.  All CMAs grew 24.3 percent. They range from a high of 172 percent for Halifax to a low of -81 percent for Moncton.  As for Thunder Bay and Sudbury, they both show a negative performance with -2.7 percent for Thunder Bay and -4 percent for Greater Sudbury.




This building permit report comes in the wake of Conference Board Reports showing that these two cities have sluggish economies. However, with respect to building permits in Ontario they are not doing as badly as Hamilton, Windsor, Peterborough or St. Catharines.  Another intriguing result is the Ottawa area where Ottawa/Gatineau shows annual growth of 13.7 percent but the Gatineau part is at -12.7 percent and the Ottawa part grew at 18.9 percent.