CALGARY – For the past seven years, the mining community of Baia Mare in Romania’s northern interior has eagerly stepped up to alleviate Alberta’s labour shortages. For Joe Giusti, founder and CEO of one of Western Canada’s largest construction companies, it was a long way to travel to search for workers.
It was hard, too, once he found them. His firm, Giusti Group, had to teach recruits basic English so they would understand safety regulations. They had to meet rigid immigration requirements for temporary foreign workers. They had to be moved to an unfamiliar work environment, and sent back home just as they were getting used to their new jobs and way of life.
Yet Mr. Giusti was so encouraged by the enthusiasm shown by hundreds of young people who answered his calls for carpenters, cement finishers and general labourers, and by their performance in Alberta, he led recruitment missions there several times. Meanwhile, he was pleased to notice how the local community’s economy flourished from a steady influx of Alberta oil cash, as people dressed better, bought new furniture and renovated houses.
‘I invested 40 years of my life to build up a business and I have no people’
“When I went to Romania the first time, it brought me back to the 1960s in Italy,” said the builder, who since moving to Western Canada four decades ago from Treviso, near Venice, completed more than 50,000 multi-family units and took on some of the West’s biggest industrial projects, even as he fine-tuned a passion for oil painting using Titian’s colour techniques.
“I looked at them and I said: These are my people, like the ones from my village. I can see it in their hands. They are hard working people. They can do anything.”
Employers in Western Canada, and particularly in the ever-expanding oil industry, have been looking for workers farther and farther afield to fill jobs in resource development. The early favourites decades ago were farm kids from Saskatchewan. Then it was women and First Nations. Then it was Newfoundland. Then they brought in planeloads of workers from northern Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia in elaborate fly-in and fly-out schemes.
Today, with those sources tapped out and more and more projects on the horizon, the new fix is foreign labour.
While the practice is not new, what’s new is how many employers, who seem to be sticking with their growth strategies regardless of the state of the global economy, are looking to struggling countries to replenish their workforces – including advanced economies such as the United States and the U.K.
Mr. Giusti is continuing to tap Romania’s workforce and is looking in other foreign markets such as the U.S. for pump operators and mechanics, who must be fluent in English.
And yet he is watching with anxiety Western Canada’s rising economy. With a staff of 500 and 200 job openings he is struggling to fill, he no longer accepts construction work in Calgary, while his family-owned company doubles down on work already under way, including a 1,500-worker camp and a processing plant for Husky Energy Inc.’s Sunrise oil sands project northeast of Fort McMurray.
“We are creating a mess,” Mr. Giusti laments. “There is a boom, and there are few qualified people. Most of the jobs are done with unqualified people and improper workmanship. I would say lousy workmanship — and for a huge amount of money.”
The push for foreign labour is in part a response to immigration reforms announced two months ago by Jason Kenney, the federal immigration minister, that opened up access to skilled tradesmen and make it possible for them to come to Canada as permanent residents, rather as temporary foreign workers.
Workforce pressures have been mounting for a long time. Western Canadian employers are concerned about Baby Boomer retirements and leakage to other sectors. They are worried that workers laid off in the 2008/2009 financial downturn may have left the industry. They complain that Canada’s youth are snubbing trades because they don’t consider them as prestigious, the work is hard and drug and alcohol use isn’t allowed because of safety concerns.
Increasing foreign investment is also playing a role. International companies, from Europe to China, are clamoring to bring in their own staff to work on their projects.
While the growing list of mega-projects in the Alberta oil sands, Saskatchewan’s potash industry, new pipelines, new liquefied natural gas projects in British Columbia is good news for Canada’s economy, it also raises questions about who will do the work. The labour markets of Alberta and Saskatchewan, where most of the projects are based, are already the tightest in the country, each with an unemployment rate of 4.5% in May. Projections show a staggering number of oil jobs will open up in coming years.
In a recent study, the Petroleum Human Resources Council of Canada predicted the oil and gas industry alone will need to fill 15,000 direct oil and gas jobs between now and 2015, on an industry base of about 187,000, just to replace retiring employees or those moving to other sectors, and not including employees moving from company to company.
Growth projects beyond 2015 — when many major energy projects are scheduled to begin construction — aren’t even taken into account. Even an economic pullback related to a softening global economy won’t matter.
“Right now, [oil and gas] exploration and production companies are actually hiring more and retaining more than they need to given their current activity because they are preparing for growth and for the loss of experienced people,” said Cheryl Knight, the council’s executive director and CEO. “No downturn is going to eliminate that. It’s more a structural issue. I believe these [economic] cycles are going to have less of an impact on hiring than they have in the past.”
Ms. Knight said the oil and gas industry tends to hire new entrants right out of school, but there are not enough of them to replace the skills shortage that is looming because of retirements. That’s one reason for the focus on foreign-trained workers.
The construction industry, which in Western Canada is heavily focused on projects related to the oil industry and other resource sectors, has even bigger job requirements. Mr. Kenney spoke of tens if not hundreds of thousands of oil job shortages in the skilled trades in the next decade when he announced the immigration reforms.
The Alberta government estimates there will be 114,000 more jobs of all kinds than people in the province in the next 10 years.
Read More at The Financial Post
