November 5, 2007

Skilled Labour

Alberta launches initiative to attract skilled labour

DEAN BENNETT

THE CANADIAN PRESS

EDMONTON

To aid a construction industry straining to keep up with voracious infrastructure growth, Alberta has rolled out a 10-year plan to woo more labour help from abroad and give further assistance to those at home.

Industry Minister Iris Evans called the plan “a strong blueprint” to aid a sector fighting critical across-the-board labour shortages.

“The key thing is training our own properly,” said Evans.

“We’ll work on the apprenticeship strategy and make sure that people that want to retrain, earn new skills and get opportunities to get engaged in construction get that chance.”

The province will work with industry groups in a range of areas to improve prospects in a field that expects to create 50,000 new jobs over the next five years to bring the total to almost 223,000.

The government pledged to push for more emphasis on trade skills in Canada’s immigration policies and on streamlining rules for immigrants and temporary foreign workers. It also wants Ottawa to modify employment insurance rules to encourage workers from areas of high unemployment to move to Alberta.

Mentoring programs will be developed to bring more women and aboriginals into the workforce. Currently, 86 per cent of workers in the field are men.

More will be done to reduce workplace injuries. To encourage labour mobility, the government will try to improve the processes to recognize and certify credentials of those who work outside Alberta.

An ad campaign will try to reach under-employed Albertans who might be thinking of a job change.

An apprenticeship-employer referral program will be developed to help apprentices seeking training opportunities.

Industry leaders say help is needed immediately on all fronts.

Heidi Harris of the Alberta Roadbuilders and Heavy Construction Association said they need staff in every area — project superintendents, heavy equipment operators, professional engineers, managers and entry-level field workers.

“There’s a big gap when it comes to equipment operators, graders, scrapers, crawler tractors, excavators, everything you see out there we’re lacking for sure,” said Harris.

“We’re simply lacking the population to cover the projects that are coming down the pike in the next decade or so.”

Among the major projects are twinning Highway 63 south of the oilsands locus of Fort McMurray, the completion of ring roads in Edmonton and Calgary and a major backlog of cracks and chips on scores of other roads.

“It’s not just a handful of big projects. There’s a whole lot of little projects, too.”

Ken Gibson, executive director of the Alberta Construction Association, said the demands on builders are unprecedented.

“Our peak period has not yet arrived and it will be prolonged. We’re looking from 2008 forward for four or five years being very, very challenging to finding sufficient number of skilled workers.”

He said they anticipate 20,000 new workers will be required over the next seven years just to replace those retiring or moving on. This problem, he said, is compounded by the fact Alberta can’t expect to rely on its traditional method of simply bringing in more help from economically depressed areas elsewhere in Canada.

“We’ve got the Olympic effort underway in British Columbia. There’s a major renaissance of resource-based development in Saskatchewan — their diamond mines, their potash mines, their oil and gas sector. Manitoba is undertaking major work on hydro dams. Ontario is already pretty steady and there’s a lot of energy-related work going on in Atlantic Canada,” said Gibson.

Alberta’s construction industry is the province’s third largest in terms of employment. There were 172,600 workers in 2006, about nine per cent of the total provincial labour force, with unemployment at a low 4.4 per cent. The average hourly wage was $20.95 in 2006, about six per cent higher than the average across all industries.

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