Resource development in oil and gas has recently been touted as the centrepiece of Canada's economic future but the move to revitalize another historic resource industry, the forest sector, also merits fresh attention.

The Canadian forest products industry has been emerging from a difficult downturn by transforming itself. It has been changing its business model by improving productivity and competitiveness, diversifying products and markets, building world-class environmental credentials and looking to ways to produce new innovative products from wood fibre.

Condo marketing guru Bob Rennie has a simple response to talk that Metro Vancouver's real estate market is headed for a hard landing because of sky-high prices.

"It's not a bubble," Rennie, director of Rennie Marketing Systems, said in an interview following his keynote address Thursday to the Urban Development Institute.

"With 80 per cent of the [condo] market that traded in [Metro] Vancouver last year, you only needed a household income of $52,800 to purchase.

British Columbia's exports will jump 13 per cent in 2013 after a relatively slow 2012, Export Development Canada said in a forecast released on Thursday.

Energy is B.C.'s largest export sector, making up 31 per cent of the province's exports by value. But while volumes have increased, those increases have been more than offset by falling prices, said Peter Hall, EDC's chief economist.

Many first-time condo buyers rationalize a potential purchase something like this:

"I'm paying $1,200 a month in rent," they say. "The mort-gage on a sweet little place of my own will be $1,000 a month. So I'll be saving $200.

"Right?"

"Wrong," says Scott Hannah, the Vancouver-based president of the non-profit Credit Counselling Society, who has heard this kind of flawed reasoning more times than he cares to count.

Natural gas companies are get-ting antsy.

Sure, they can see the long-term potential of their industry, but first they need to get past natural gas prices that have hit rock bottom.

"In the current market environment there are natural gas producers who are definitely in survival mode and some of them won't survive - there are producers who are likely generating negative cash flows today," Barry Munro, leader of Ernst & Young's Canadian oil and gas practice, said in an interview.

B.C. is being constrained by the federal government in its efforts to attract the number of immigrants it needs to support economic growth in the face of a looming labour shortage, a new report finds.

The province’s share of economic immigrants, determined by the federal government, has shrunk in recent years, even as B.C. plays an increasingly important role in driving national growth, said the report, prepared by the province’s immigration task force and released on Tuesday.

B.C. continues to grey faster than the rest of Canada, with seven of the 10 municipalities with the highest proportion of persons aged 65 and over located in this province.

And Qualicum Beach is still the hotspot for seniors, with nearly one out of every two people (47.2%) living in the Vancouver Island community - the highest share of all municipalities across Canada, according to latest Census data. Parksville (37.1 per cent) and Sidney (36.9 per cent) followed close behind, while Creston, Nanaimo and White Rock were also among the 10 in B.C.