Manufacturing: It’s a sector of the Saskatchewan economy that has been quietly chugging along while many in the rest of the country were retrenching because of COVID.
We ended last year by posting a gain of almost six per cent in December, one of the stronger performances in the nation and the best outside of the Maritimes. It’s back to where we were before the pandemic a year ago.
Revenues for this sector in Saskatchewan run in the range of $.125 billion a month, so it is a major revenue generator and job creator. What makes the 2020 performance so notable is how well it stood up, despite the pandemic.
One of the biggest players in the sector is the Co-op Refinery in Regina which, like many in the commercial world, saw demand interruptions brought on by the pandemic. People were not commuting to work as much or had cut back on pleasure travel. This cut into demand.
Yet other parts of this sector – companies engaged in things like farm machinery making – were seeing gains that were enough to offset the petroleum side of the equation.
