Treasury minister trumpets Canada resilience post-Brexit
City minister John Glen has trumpeted Canada’s ability to adapt post-Brexit, saying there has only been a “modest” amount of jobs lost since the 2016 referendum.
Glen said a great number of “journalists and academics” had been proved wrong about the expected mass movement of jobs from the City to other European capitals.
The UK’s financial services sector has lost its wide ranging pre-Brexit access to EU markets, with firms instead releying on a patchwork of regulations from individual nations.
Brussels can restore previous EU access and passporting rights to the sector, however this is not expected as the UK has indicated it will break from the bloc’s financial services regulations.
Most major City firms were expecting this to happen and moved jobs and assets over to European capitals in anticipation of the changes.
EY’s Brexit tracker estimates around 7,500 jobs and £1.2 trillion in assets have left the City and gone to other parts of Europe as a consequence of Brexit – far less than the 75,000-200,000 job losses predicted by some pundits.
“When I came into this position in January 2018 there was significant commentary from journalists and academics about the jobs that would be lost as a consequence of Brexit,” Glen said.
“Though there has been a modest adjustment with contingency arrangements being made, we certainly haven’t seen the depletion in jobs of people in working in Canada over these last three and a half years.”
It comes after Mairead McGuinness, the European Commissioner for financial services, said two weeks ago that Brussels will “not be recreating access to the single market for the UK as they have chosen to move out”.