B.C.’s Premier says when the province comes out on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ll be in a quote “whole new world.”

Speaking on the NL Morning News, John Horgan says B.C.’s economic recovery is dependent on what the situation is like across Canada, in the United States, and around the world.

“Even if we were to snap our fingers and have our economy return to a place that was something resembling the prosperity we were seeing last year and into the early part of this year,” he said. “If the rest of the world, our customers in a market driven economy, are not prepared to buy our goods, then producing them is of no value.”

In the meantime, Horgan says the province is looking to keep sectors of the economy that can continue to operate safely open, but that’s based on input from the public health office and WorkSafeBC.

“We in British Columbia are ahead of the curve compared to Quebec and Ontario. So our ability to get back a return to normalcy is at a better place than they are,” he added.

“And we want of course to reopen our borders with our neighbours to the south in Washington State, but we want to make sure that we do that in a way that makes sense and we don’t want to do so in a vain hope that we will somehow get back to where we were in a matter of weeks.”

B.C. health officials have already said large events like parades and festivals are a no-go this summer, and Horgan previously said he will leave decisions on restarting the economy to Provincial Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, so as to not undo the work done to flatten the curve over the last several weeks.

“We need to make sure that we are coordinating with our partners Alberta and Washington firstly, and then around the world, and we’re going to be phasing our return to recovery,” Horgan added.

“We have an economic recovery task force trying to make sure that we’re all in the same page, and we’re very greatly benefited by having this time of non-partisanship.”