Labour pains
Canada’s workforce doesn’t match employers’ needs
It is one of the great mysteries of Canada that some regions can have high unemployment while positions go unfilled in other parts of the country. A new report from CIBC World Markets highlights that juxtaposition once again by pointing out that 30 per cent of Canada’s businesses can’t find the type of employee they need to run their businesses efficiently.
In a look at what economist Benjamin Tal labelled the “labour market mismatch,” the CIBC says that double the number of Canadian businesses now report a labour shortage when compared to 2010, with the highest shortages reported in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The skills shortages include health care, mining, advanced manufacturing and business services.
Even more telling when it comes to a mismatch, CIBC highlights how the labour crunch has arrived at the same time as job creation across much of Canada has slowed. In other words, even though there are Canadians in search of jobs — 250,000 have been unemployed for longer than six months — they don’t have the skills needed by employers.
The CIBC study gives little in the way of reasons for the mismatch, but this is not the first time the paradox of a pool of unemployed Canadians has been analyzed.
There is plenty of blame to go around on this one. For starters, our federal system of transfer payments and specialized unemployment programs for some regions, lead to propping up too-generous social programs in some of the havenot provinces. The result has been that one can work for only part of the year in highunemployment regions such as pockets of Atlantic Canada and then rely on employment insurance and other social programs for the remainder of the year. That’s not helpful to either the labour shortage or to public finances. It also explains why unemployment is still in the double digits in three out of four provinces in Atlantic Canada, while some towns in the West must import labour from overseas.
Also to blame is provincial policy that rarely questions university administrators about how they spend tax and tuition dollars. When was the last time a provincial cabinet minister, out loud, questioned a trendy program on some campus? Such silence leads to acquiescence in the notion that every course and faculty are created equal, regardless of their relationship to the real world and real job market. Such policies and silence lead to university graduates with the wrong skill sets who end up underemployed or unemployed.
Perhaps university administrators should try to churn out a few more mining engineers. Or perhaps governments should direct more money to trade schools instead of liberal arts universities.
Lastly, let’s not forget the role of parents. Too many Canadians have a bias against the trades. That’s a mistake because so-called blue collar work is every bit as valuable as that performed behind a computer — more so these days, even monetarily, given the skills shortage. Canadian parents ought to rethink whether every Johnny and Suzie needs a degree; perhaps they need to learn how to use a drill instead. That appears to be what study after study keeps revealing.