This week’s poll question: which B.C. human resources sector most needs to be designated an essential service:
•public school education; or
•training people for jobs that need filling.
Option 1 is so mired in emotion and political intrigue that the likelihood of its being designated anything other than a political football is as remote as balanced government budgets.
Option 2, however, needs your attention today because without some immediate meaningful action being taken on it, the province is going to be in severe economic distress.
The BC Teachers Federation (BCTF) strike has sharpened public focus on B.C. public school education quality and training supply and demand.
The BCTF’s score thus far: too many demands that have too little to do with improving education and too much supply.
The former has been well-documented in assorted media. The BCTF supply end, however, has come under less scrutiny. Consider, for example, that, according to a UBC release late last year, the province certified 2,700 new teachers in 2010, but only about 1,500 positions were available. Depending on who you talk to, the job opportunity deficit is far wider.
That might be more easily justified were B.C. rich in human resources capable of filling the wealth of job opportunities that northern energy and resource projects are creating.
The opposite, however, is true. The province’s wealth-creating industries are crying out for skilled labour. But B.C.’s school system is turning out anything but.
As Janine North, Northern Development Initiative Trust CEO, points out: “The north isn’t graduating surplus graduates except in liberal arts without specialization.”
The province instead is more adept at producing Occupy Vancouver deep thinkers who are too busy demonizing “climate change deniers” to move to where jobs are.
The costs of inadequately staffing the north are multiplying already. Consider as a recent example Thompson Creek Minerals’ $1.3 billion Mount Milligan copper mine, where construction costs have jumped 20% because of what the company’s CEO said is a skilled-labour shortage.That’s a $200 million bill for one project alone. But the north is not unique in being skills starved. Manufacturers all over the province are in the same boat. According to Peter Jeffrey, the shortage is retarding the growth of many companies even before B.C.’s inventory of mega-projects and amped up oilsands activity come fully on line.
The Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters, BC vice-president said a recent survey of 25 CME members found that 64% had skills shortages that were limiting their ability to take on new business.
Solutions to this increasingly pressing problem are many. Most reside in providing tax or other incentives for workers to move north, making training programs more responsive to job market needs and streaming youth into dual-credit trades programs so they can enrol in apprenticeship training while they graduate from high school.
B.C. could have the world’s highest-paid teachers with the best benefits packages anywhere and it wouldn’t do the province’s economy a lick of good if we’re not filling the demands that industry and the job market have. What we have now is a teachers’ union whose compensation demands are divorced from reality and an education system that’s increasingly disconnected from employment needs. •
