B.C. cites ‘critical’ need for foreign workers

British Columbia’s minister of natural gas urged the federal government to keep the doors open on temporary foreign workers as the province looks to head off a skill shortage tied to development of a liquefied natural gas industry.

“It’s critical, quite frankly, to the Canadian economy,” Rich Coleman said Wednesday in Calgary. “We can’t be like Australia and decide that we want to restrict the movement of labour coming in, because that really affected the cost of construction for these plants.”

A plan by the federal government to cap the number of low-wage foreign workers and impose higher fees on companies that make use of the program has raised the ire of politicians in Western Canada, which suffers from chronic labour shortages in key sectors from mining to energy.

The changes don’t target higher-skilled trades, Coleman told reporters following his address at an energy conference. But he cautioned against making broad changes to the program, warning they could jeopardize future investments in the country.

B.C. is counting on temporary foreign workers to help fill as many as 100,000 jobs if LNG projects materialize as planned.

The province is on the brink of a multi-billion-dollar resource boom as major energy companies seek to deliver natural gas by tanker to energy-hungry Asian markets, where prices are higher. As many as 14 of the export terminals are proposed, but analysts have cautioned that only a few will ultimately get built.

To meet industry workforce needs, the province has pledged to overhaul its education system and bolster local ranks of skilled tradespeople.

But an aging workforce and heated competition from rival export projects has stoked concern that B.C. is at risk of seeing the same sharp cost overruns that hampered Australia’s LNG boom.

“I want to move a project forward as quickly as I reasonably can,” Marvin Odum, president of Royal Dutch Shell PLC’s U.S. subsidiary, told reporters in Vancouver last month.

“But until there’s some clarity on workforce issues and labour availability, you can’t make that decision.”

The European oil major is the lead partner in a joint venture with PetroChina, Mitsubishi Corp. and Korea Gas Corp.