Just to post on the other side of nation, Atlantic Canada seems to have a real shortage of workers as well.
I’ve talked to HVAC, painting, and electrical companies, and they all are short handed due to staff leaving perfectly good jobs here to go out west where the money is much better. Heck, even the seafood processing plants are bringing in temp workers from Jamaica and the Ukraine as they just can’t fill the manual labour needs with local bodies.
I’m just bumping this.
A friend in the family just told us that the number of jobs has shrunk massively now that extracting oil from the tar sands is no longer viable due to the low price of oil.
Can an Albertans confirm this?
Even more recently then that.
Apparently in the last week the help wanted signs have vanished.
Isn’t being Canadian a job in itself?
Drilling and exploration are way down. After the NEP massacre of the 70’s/80’s, though, oil and gas companies have learned to be very conservative - they practically need a 100% guarantee of returns to start projects, and they pride themselves on “running lean” (read: shortstaffed and working people to death). My best guess (living in Calgary, working at an O&G-related company and talking to a sister and brother-in-law who work at O&G companies) is that they are putting projects on the back burner but not cancelling them. It is a fairly sure bet that the oil price will rise again.
Alberta is an unusual case, though, too, because you have to remember that we have been unbelievably, unsustainably busy here, and a slowdown is actually a very good thing.
This was on the evening news tonight. Yes, the number of oilpatch jobs is shrinking–many of those who had come from other parts of Canada to work in Alberta have been laid off and have returned to their home provinces. The price of oil is to blame; extraction is continuing, but not at the pace it was before. Thus, fewer jobs.
This isn’t actually so unusual. Alberta tends to go through boom-and-bust periods. We’ve had the boom, now it’s time for the bust. At some point, we’ll boom again.