Over the next five years, $33 billion is expected to pour into northern B.C., as new mines start churning rocks, Rio Tinto Alcan upgrades its Kitimat aluminum smelter, liquefied natural gas terminals are built and the Northwest Transmission Line is strung from Terrace to Bob Quinn Lake.
Meanwhile, Vancouver and Victoria Shipyards will tackle $8 billion worth of federal contract work during the next couple of decades. But finding engineers, project managers and skilled trades people to fill all of those jobs could pose a challenge, say organizations such as the Business Council of BC (BCBC) and Conference Board of Canada.
“There’s a major shortage of the kind of workers the big corporations need,” said Diana MacKay, director of education, health and immigration programs at the Conference Board.
“Pipefitters and engineers – these are people that are in high demand, and we can’t produce them quickly enough.”
Seaspan Marine alone will need 800 to 1,000 more workers to fulfil its portion of the national shipbuilding contract, forcing it to compete with northern B.C. for skilled workers.
“There’s a lot of work going on in the province and the workers we use here have skills that make them valuable,” John Shaw, vice-president program management at Seaspan in North Vancouver, recently told Business in Vancouver. “There’s ... significant other industrial work going on that will compete for the same labour pool.”
Meanwhile, the mining sector’s labour needs are expected to grow significantly in the coming decade. The Mining Association of BC (MABC) expects at least some of those jobs will need to be filled by skilled immigrants.
“Mining is definitely going to be a challenge,” said BCBC chief economist and vice-president Ken Peacock.
Zoe Younger, vice-president of corporate affairs at MABC, agreed.
“By the time we’ve identified the skill sets that are required, it’s often four to six years ... before we’re actually cranking out graduates that can fill those positions. So there’s that time in the interim where we’re going to be more dependent on finding other sources of labour.”
But as MacKay points out, Canada will be competing with other countries for those skilled labourers, and it’s not just skilled labourers that will be in demand.
A recent Leger Marketing survey found that 43% of Canadian companies anticipate a shortage of executives in the next five to 10 years.
According to a recent Conference Board report, Canada will need to increase the 260,000 immigrants it admits per year to 375,000 “in order to stabilize the workforce and ensure economic growth.”
But Peacock said that, for now, B.C. is holding its own attracting skilled immigrants.
“We historically have gotten far more immigrants here [than elsewhere in Canada],” he said. “We really won’t see huge shortages. The Canada profile is quite different from the B.C. profile.”
In 2010, 44,183 immigrants settled in B.C., 6,208 of whom were admitted as skilled workers. Another 10,451 arrived as spouses, children or parents of those skilled workers. Still, the B.C. government fears the demand for skilled workers will exceed availability a few years from now.
In December, Victoria launched a special task force to examine federal and provincial immigration programs to ensure B.C. is not left short-handed.
One million job openings are expected in Canada in the next 10 years, two-thirds of which will result from retirement. One-third of those jobs will need to be filled by immigrants, Premier Christy Clark said December 8, when she appointed Richmond-Steveston MLA John Yap to head the task force.
“We simply don’t have enough people, currently, in British Columbia of working age to be able to fill those jobs,” Clark said.
“This is a competitive world for skilled immigrants,” Yap told Business in Vancouver. “Australia wants them, the U.S. wants them, other jurisdictions want them. We’re doing well but we can’t rest on our laurels.”
Immigrants can come to B.C. to work either through federal programs for skilled workers or investors or through provincial nominee programs.
Under federal programs, immigrants can settle anywhere they like. Employers prefer the provincial nominee program because it allows skilled workers to be brought to certain regions for specific jobs.
The biggest problem Clark’s government sees with the provincial nominee program is that it allows only 3,500 entrants per year. Her government wants to raise that annual intake to at least 5,000.
Overtrained and underpaid
Having worked in emergency rooms and field hospitals in Iraq and Cambodia, Steves Islefo has experience with some of the most challenging injuries a trauma surgeon can face: burns, blast wounds and amputations.
Despite his experience, the Iraqi surgeon has been forced to work in construction since immigrating to Vancouver in July 2010.
“I’m just doing survival jobs – nothing that relates to my experience,” Islefo told BIV.
Meanwhile, Bernado Gazol, who has a BA in architecture and experience in that field, has likewise been unable to find a job in his area of expertise since immigrating to Vancouver from Nicaragua in September 2010.
Their experiences underscore one of the problems B.C. has when it comes to attracting skilled labour: it’s difficult to get foreign credentials recognized in B.C.
“I think the pace at which we’re making progress on the credential recognition is slow,” said MacKay.
A big gap is B.C.’s capacity to assess new immigrants’ skills, said Kevin Evans, CEO of the Industry Training Authority (ITA).
Currently, admission is based on a multiple choice exam that is “of limited utility” for people with English as a second language, Evans said, when a labour skills competency test might be more practical.
Foreign-trained physicians like Islefo, for example, must take a series of tests and then complete a residency in a Canadian hospital before the Medical Council of Canada will certify them.
But available residency positions are scarce, and Islefo said Canadian medical school graduates tend to get those placements first. Meanwhile, he can’t work in a Canadian hospital even in a lesser capacity.
MacKay said the conference board wants to see less emphasis placed on credential recognition and more on skills testing.
“I think a much smarter policy direction would be to pump the same kind of resources into competency assessment,” she said. “You actually test somebody’s skill as opposed to saying, ‘Do you have a degree from somewhere?’”
Philipp Fuhrmann, a German immigrant and president and COO of Coquitlam’s CapTherm Systems, got permanent resident status in Canada because he married a Canadian citizen.
But his business partner, Timo Minx, who invented the data centre cooling system that CapTherm is developing, had a more difficult time getting into Canada. He was able to immigrate to B.C. from Germany only after Fuhrmann got him a positive labour market opinion (LMO), which requires an employer to vouch for a skilled worker from another country.
Immigrants who come to Canada under that program can become permanent residents if they stay employed for three consecutive years with the company that sponsored them. Ironically, Fuhrmann said it’s easier to get a positive labour market opinion for low-skilled workers.
“If you want to be a live-in caregiver or a dishwasher or work in hospitality, it’s a lot easier to get in than if you are a high-end engineer,” he said. “It’s very odd.”
That may, in part, explain why the Philippines is second only to China when it comes to country of origin for immigrants to B.C. The Philippine government has a policy aimed at training nurses and caregivers, who then get jobs in other countries and send remittances home. MacKay said the program is mutually beneficial because Canada has a shortage of qualified nurses.
The LMO, meanwhile, was set up to help ensure that preference is given to Canadian workers ahead of immigrants. The end result is that Canadian employers may find it easier to recruit nannies than engineers.
“It’s really hard to recruit talent,” Fuhrmann said. “There’s all these additional obstacles, which you really don’t need when you’re a startup. With Timo, if we wouldn’t have gotten his LMO, then we wouldn’t have founded a company in Canada. We would have been forced to go elsewhere.” •
Startup Visa stimulating influx of tech talent
A few Vancouver high-tech incubators and accelerators have hatched several promising startups recently, but they all have one thing in common: none were started by Canadian citizens.
CapTherm Systems, SunnyTrail and Summify were founded by young entrepreneurs from Europe, some of whom are in B.C. on temporary permits.
CapTherm Systems was founded by two young German entrepreneurs, while Summify (which summarizes all your social news feeds) and SunnyTrail (an analytics platform) were both started by entrepreneurs from Romania.
A group of Vancouver techpreneurs, including Boris Wertz, an immigrant and angel investor, has launched a campaign aimed at making it easier for young entrepreneurs to immigrate to Canada to start a business.
The Startup Visa campaign is the Canadian version of a similar campaign started in the U.S.
Coming to Canada on an entrepreneur visa requires immigrants to invest $300,000 here. Most young entrepreneurs don’t have that kind of money, said Startup Visa spokesman Eric Brooke.
The campaign is lobbying Ottawa to lower that investment requirement to $150,000, and instead of requiring entrepreneurs to invest that money themselves, they would raise it through Canadian investors.
“If you don’t make money, if you don’t create jobs, you lose your visa,” Brooke said.
In July, Citizenship and Immigration Canada temporarily suspended the entrepreneur program. Brooke hopes that will give the high-tech industry the chance to see the program and its requirements revised.
“We have a lot of interested young technical people who want to start companies here,” Brooke said. “The visa is about how can we make this faster and easier?”
