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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Alberta. Ontario and even Quebec and maybe BC actually have industry.

It's a high share on Alberta, but definitively not close to "the entire economy"

According to the most recent Statistics Canada's National Economic Accounts, the Mining and Oil and Gas Extraction industry accounted for approximately 26% of Alberta's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2020, an increase from 23.3% in 2010.

However that 23.3% undersells its importance. Primary industries like mining, oil and gas extraction have large knock on effects on the rest of the economy. Many of the retail and service companies would go out of business if the fossil fuel industry were to disappear overnight.

Right. I wish we had a better metric than GDP for capturing the downstream impacts of an industry.

Say a town grows up around a single manufacturing plant. That plant might only account for 30% of the town's GPD because people use their wages to buy food, housing, etc. But when that plant closes up and 90% of the towns income disappears, it's hard to argue that the plant only contributed 30% of the economy in that case.

GPD != economy. GPD describes how money is spent, not necessarily in what order it is generated.

Does the notion of a GDP even make sense for a town? I've never seen it applied to any unit except nations as a whole (or the EU).

I suspect you need to collect reliable information on imports and exports and capital flows to calculate GDP, and a town can't collect it because it doesn't have, e.g., a customs bureacracy.

> Does the notion of a GDP even make sense for a town?

Yes, of course it does. Why wouldn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP

BC has Coal as it's number 1 export, and logging a close second.

“Almost all of the thermal coal Canada produces comes from coal mines in Alberta and is exported, mainly to Asia, from ports in B.C.”

https://globalnews.ca/news/10392382/canada-coal-exports/

More than half of Canada's coal production is metallurgical coal, suited for steel production. Most of that is mined in BC and exported. The grandparent comment and the above response are both true.

Washington state refuses to allow for coal export terminals, while California’s two coal export ports are too small, so a lot of western American coal is exported via BC also.

You can't eat cars, coal, and oil. If you're trying to say only those matter.

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