Recent news reports that Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and the federal government are contemplating creating a "skilled worker" stream for permanent immigration are welcome news for the construction industry.
By most accounts, Canada's construction industry will again be plagued with manpower shortages in the near future.
The single largest factor leading to this shortage is the aging workforce. By 2015, it is estimated that 35 per cent of Canada’s population will be aged 55 years or older.
View from the Board
Bill Stewart
An estimated 3.8 million workers are expected to retire between 2005 and 2015.
In construction, 210,000 of the current 1.2 million workers are expected to retire over the next eight years.
While the impending demographic tsunami has been known for years, solutions are complex and clouded by politics.
Many argue that these shortages can be addressed solely with Canadians.
A good deal of progress is already being made through increased apprenticeships and training along with outreach initiatives to attract youth and people from traditionally under-represented segments of the labour market.
For example, according to Statistics Canada, the number of apprentices registered in carpentry, electrical, plumbing and pipefitting trades was 83,000 in 1991. By 2009, that number increased to almost 155,000, despite the recession.
More can and will be done to develop domestic labour supplies. It just makes sense.
Despite the best efforts of governments, business associations, contractors and labour suppliers, forecasts indicate that there will be a significant shortfall in domestic resources to meet demands.
The Construction Owners Association of Alberta (COAA) for example, estimates that almost 160,000 offshore constructions workers will be needed within the next eight years to satisfy all the projected workforce needs.
Unfortunately for the construction industry, Canada’s current immigration system does a poor job of targeting immigration for high-demand construction occupations.
This is particularly true of the Skilled Worker Program (SWP), where about 280,000 people are admitted annually.
According to the ministry, 46 per cent of admissions under the program have a master’s degree or PhD, while less than 3.0 per cent of admissions were apprentices or held a formal trade certificate.
Kenney was right on when he noted that, “People who are skilled tradespeople have an almost impossible job coming to Canada under our current system.” No kidding!
The current system is heavily weighted on educational achievement.
For construction, this has resulted in less than 700 people with trades or construction experience being admitted annually under the current permanent immigration regime.
With numbers like this, is it any wonder why contractors have had to resort to the controversial Temporary Foreign Worker program to help supplement their workforce?
In light of this, how is it possible to reconcile the fact that only 55 steamfitter-pipe fitters – a trade vital to industrial construction and maintenance on energy related projects – were permitted into Canada under the SWP from 2005 to 2010?
Additionally, why were contractors authorized to bring up to 4,300 steamfitter-pipefitters into Canada from 2007 to 2009 under the TFW program?
In Alberta, the most recent Major Projects Inventory lists $201 billion in construction investments across various construction sectors over the next few years.
Alberta is not alone. Saskatchewan as well as Newfoundland and Labrador, which have long been vital sources of construction workers for Alberta, are currently experiencing record levels of construction activity.
Shortages of skilled workers have occurred and will continue to occur despite record levels of apprenticeship training in Canada. Without immigration reforms, such as the creation of a permanent stream for immigrants with trades skills, as Minister Kenney is suggesting, it is abundantly clear that the current immigration system will be unable to help deal with the impending skilled worker shortages in construction.
Bill Stewart is the vice-president of the Merit Contractors Association in Alberta. Bill is also a member of the Journal of Commerce Editorial Advisory Board.
After 20 years of attracting nearly 60 per cent of all newcomers to Canada, Ontario’s share of immigration is in steep decline and threatens to intensify the province’s economic struggles.
The first population figures from the 2011 census will be released Wednesday and they’re expected to show that Ontario’s rate of growth has dropped. Since 2001, Ontario has seen its share of immigration drop nearly 20 percentage points. In 2009, Ontario received nearly 107,000 new immigrants, the lowest number in 30 years.
“Ontario’s going to show declining growth, that’s for sure,” said Doug Norris, senior vice-president at Environics Analytics and a leading expert on the census. “They’ve pulled immigrants out of Ontario, and immigrants drive growth, so Ontario’s going to be down.”
The primary reason is a restructuring of Canadian immigration that gave more control to provincial governments. Ontario, for so long an irresistible magnet to highly educated skilled workers, was slow to adjust. The status quo had served it well. While provinces such as Manitoba, British Columbia and Alberta jumped at the newly created provincial nominee program early in the decade, Ontario did little.
“Ontario didn’t use [the nominee program] very much because for a long time it thought it was getting the numbers and also the kinds of immigrants it wanted,” said Leslie Seidle, research director for immigration at the Institute for Research on Public Policy.
While the number of immigrants remained constant at about 250,000 per year, Ontario’s share shrank. The other provinces used the nominee program to gobble up applicants, such as tradespeople, who don’t fare well in the points system for skilled-worker applications. As the skilled-worker stream declined, so did Ontario.
It’s only recently that the Ontario government woke up to the significance of the numbers, said Naomi Alboim, an immigration expert who teaches public policy at Queen’s University. She said the trend to a smaller share of immigration will have a major impact.
“I think it’s very serious. In Ontario, we need immigration for demographic purposes, for longer-term economic objectives. There are still some significant skill shortages and these numbers are not good,” she said.
Ontario still attracts by far the most immigrants of any province. And there is a significant backlog of as many as 58,000 skilled-worker applicants who would like to come to Ontario but whose applications have not been processed. The province started its own nominee program in 2007, but it brings in roughly 1,000 people a year, compared to 12,000 annually in Manitoba.
Charles Sousa, Ontario’s Citizenship and Immigration Minister, said the province needs to negotiate its own deal on immigration. He said he has discussed it with his federal counterpart, Jason Kenney, and he intends to continue those talks.
“It’s just not fair that Quebec, B.C., Alberta have agreements with the federal government that allow them to make decisions that we are not allowed to do. Ontario deserves to have the same equity, the same level of fairness,” Mr. Sousa said. “We need to sit down and strike something that’s more effective for Ontario and Canada.”
One of the consequences of fewer immigrants in the province has been significant cuts to federal money for settlement services, up to $75-million over the past two years.
The South Asian Women’s Centre in Toronto is one of the organizations that suffered as a result. Kripa Sekhar, the executive director, said she hasn’t seen any noticeable drop in demand for services, despite statistics that show a 10-point drop in immigrants arriving in Toronto from 2006 to 2010. But after losing more than $500,000 in funding, she had to scale back her staff, laying off eight full-time employees. They still haven’t found other work, she said.
“I think Ontario’s nominee program needs to be strengthened,” Ms. Sekhar said. “Ontario, especially Toronto, has been the story of immigrants, and it’s a beautiful story. Why is it being stifled?
A decade ago, Manitoba was a place that grew only slowly and fretted about the day it might start to shrink. But when the results of the 2011 census are released this week, some of the most surprising population gains could be in a place that for years barely grew at all.
Over the past ten years, Manitoba has more than tripled its share of national immigration and in the process become a model for immigration reform. With roughly 3 per cent of Canada’s population, Manitoba now attracts nearly 6 per cent of its immigrants, more than 15,000 in 2010.
The overwhelming majority arrived under the provincial nominee program, which Manitoba was the first province to adopt in 1998. That decision proved to be transformative. Manitoba is not a resource-boom economy like its oil and potash-rich Prairie cousins. It grows only modestly even in the best of times. So it’s no small accomplishment that Manitoba has become a destination for immigrants.
Unusually, areas outside the city of Winnipeg began welcoming large numbers of newcomers in the early part of the decade. Brandon, a city of 40,000 is home to a major meat-packing plant that has always had trouble finding and keeping workers. Today, the plant has spawned a multicultural boom. There are now 57 language groups in Brandon, with workers from El Salvador, China, Colombia and elsewhere having led the city’s transformation.
The fastest growing region in the country in 2010 was the agricultural and manufacturing belt south of Winnipeg, populated by the church-going communities of Winkler, Morden and Altona. The area has welcomed thousands of newcomers from Germany and Mexico, many of them with families of seven or more. They’ve been helped in their adjustment by locals whose German-speaking families came to Canada last century. Since that initial wave the region has seen growing immigration from Kazakhstan and other former Soviet republics. It’s now targeting countries suffering through the European financial crisis, in particular Ireland and Belgium. The search criteria: family oriented, looking for a small community, farmers, tradespeople and entrepreneurs welcome.
Manitoba’s Citizenship and Immigration Minister Christine Melnick said the province targets the kind of immigrants who are likely to settle in the province. Often that means people with family ties to Manitoba or who will find a national or ethnic community to tap into. So far, the retention rate among nominee immigrants is nearly 83 per cent. With a median age of 28, they also tend to be younger than those in other immigration streams. A recent federal review found that Manitoba’s provincial nominees have very high rates of employment, but earn substantially less on average ($33,000 three years after arrival) than those in Alberta and British Columbia.
“We bring in people we believe will be comfortable in Manitoba. We don’t necessarily target groups for specific employment opportunities,” Ms. Melnick said.
Manitoba would like to see the cap on its nominee applicants raised. Federal Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney intends to reform Canada’s immigration system this year, but it’s not clear whether he will expand the nominee program. It may also be difficult for Manitoba, which already eats up nearly a third of the nominee allocation, to argue for more permits. In the meantime, Manitoba is pouring its resources into settling new arrivals. Finding affordable housing has recently been an issue.
Marietta Franco and her family arrived in Winnipeg three years ago from the Philippines. Ms. Franco, 43, said she was miserable for the first six months and cried regularly. It was the middle of winter and she talked openly about returning home. But other members of Winnipeg’s large Filipino community, including two brothers who sponsored her under the nominee program, persuaded her to persevere.
“Now I tell my friends [in the Philippines] it’s only the weather that’s a problem. Otherwise, this is the perfect place to live. I’ve found so many friends here,” she said. “For my children, there’s lots of opportunities.”
She and her husband recently bought their own home. He works in a plant that makes parts for buses and she works with other recent immigrants at The Immigrant Centre, a settlement agency.
Linda Lalande, executive director at the Immigrant Centre, said demand for her agency’s services has skyrocketed in recent years, as immigrants to Winnipeg nearly doubled.
The Immigrant Centre insists that every newcomer meet with a settlement worker for an assessment. They provide help with language courses, getting government ID, enrolling their kids in school and so on. That relationship between the settlement worker and the immigrant continues for months as the immigrant gets established, providing a one-stop-shop for integration. The centre also offers help with employment training. Of those who went through their employment program in December, 85 per cent are already working more than 30 hours a week.
“We have this saying, the better the start, the better the future,” Ms. Lalande said.
The sale of oil from the oil sands to China, for which the Northern Gateway pipeline and a tidewater loading terminal are controversially proposed, is the latest chapter in Canada's oldest Pacific rim relationship.
The story of the Sino-Canadian linkage began 1,500 years ago, when a Chinese Buddhist missionary first reached out for this continent.
The relationship has been marked by tears, blood, anguish, racism and a complex matrix of trade, immigration, investment and cultural, social, political and personal interests.
In its best moments Canadian and Chinese interests have come together to make life better for the people of each nation.
In Canada successful recent Chinese relations have been bipartisan, far-sighted, marked by tolerance and good will, and measured by mutual interests.
Although the political delay of cross-border construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline has lent some urgency to the Northern Gateway project, Canada has not been driven into China's arms by President Barrack Obama, as is spuriously alleged recently by campaigning Republicans.
Canada's harmonious trading relationship with China was launched by Progressive Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker a half century ago.
After the Korean War, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent refused to consider wheat sales to China.
C.D. Howe, Liberal minister of trade and commerce, was reluctantly willing to sell wheat the Soviet Union, even though it was our Cold War communist adversary.
However, between 1950 and 1953, some 29,800 Canadian soldiers had seen action against the Chinese in Korea, 516 were killed in combat and 1042 wounded, so Howe considered China an unacceptable customer.
After they formed the government in 1957, Diefenbaker, Minister of Agriculture Alvin Hamilton and Minister of Trade Gordon Churchill, saw things differently.
They gave the green light to negotiations between the Canadian Wheat Board and the Chinese.
China was in the midst of a famine which lasted from 1958 to 1962; as many as 33 million Chinese may have died from starvation and related illnesses.
In 1960, the Canadians signed a three-year, $400-million contract for 200 million bushels of wheat.
The agreement was followed by a deal for 178 million bushels followed by one for 280 million bushels.
The wheat sales to China defied U.S. policy and angered Washington whose enmity with Communist China ran deep.
Russian novelist Boris Pasternak wrote, "scratch a Russian and you'll find a peasant".
Whether it is Canadian wheat, beef, softwood lumber or oil, scratch an American and you'll find a protectionist.
But Canada had felt the lash of unfair U.S. competition in wheat sales, including free give-aways of American wheat to paying Canadian customer nation
The Americans bristled at Chinese-Canadian commercial relations but Diefenbaker didn't care a fig for their opinion.
An American company refused to provide vital dock loading equipment in British Columbia to speed the delivery of wheat to starving Chinese.
(In the face of American recalcitrance, Canada not only did deals with China but with Cuba as well.)
What is now described as globalism began with that historic wheat agreement with China.
It represented a breakthrough of scale in international economic relations after millennia of world trade on a comparatively smaller scale.
The 20th century was familiar with massive nation-to-nation strategic trade in arms, war material and oil.
However the sale of hundreds of millions of tons of Canadian wheat to China in the largest commercial transaction in history up to that time, was a peace time, post-colonial, friendly deal.
Canada and China, after the 1949 Maoist revolution, enjoyed a relationship unencumbered by the history of colonial exploitation of China by Europe and the U.S.
The opium trade, imposed upon the Chinese by the British, is symbolic of that terrible legacy.
Nonetheless, after Confederation the Canadian treatment of Chinese was besmirched by racism.
Like immigrants from many nations, the Chinese looked to Canada with hope, and called it the Golden Mountain.
Some panned for gold on the Fraser River, some travelled to the Klondike to search for the precious metal.
And in their thousands, Chinese men came to Canada to build the Canadian Pacific transcontinental railway through the Rocky Mountains, and died in accidents at the rate of one fatality for each mile of track laid.
At the conclusion of the project, the labour contractor who hired them reneged on his commitment to provide return passage to China for the Chinese construction navvies.
They were stranded and immigration policy did not allow their wives or families to join them.
Most of them lived out their lives as lonely bachelors.
In the 20th century, the imposition of a costly head tax on Chinese immigrants meant a life of bachelorhood, relieved only by inter-racial marriages.
In 1911, the Calgary Chinese United Church started a language school in which new immigrants learned to speak English for half day and spent the other half learning to cook for restaurants.
Across rural western Canada, the proliferation of Chinese cuisine in coffee shops in small towns was introduced by the graduates of that program.
I have vivid memories of being a guest, as a newspaper reporter, in the rooming houses of east Calgary populated by elderly single Chinese men who came to Canada to humble jobs with no hope of starting a family here.
Their hospitality to me was heart-rending.
I have life-long memories of eating bowls of oranges with them in their meagre rooms while they regaled me with their life stories.
One story they told was of boyhood memories of Chiang Kai Shek visiting Calgary to raise funds from the "overseas Chinese" for the revolution of 1911, which overthrew the Qing dynasty.
The accounts of early Chinese exploration of North America's west coast are most-thoroughly documented by mainstream forgotten 19th century historians and 20th century authors Charles Boland and Gavin Menzies.
Both writers are self-taught archaeologists and historians and work has been ignored or dismissed by mainstream academics.
But the legends captured in the work of Borland and Menzies are worth knowing because they were commonly known in China and had influenced the emigration to Canada, as it slowly opened the doors to immigrants of colour.
Borland wrote that, at the threshold of the 6th century when China was in one of its outgoing periods in international relations, a Buddhist missionary named Hoei Shin determined to "extend the joyful mission of salvation to all the people of the earth".
The Chinese were able mariners and map makers, and they had perfected huge sea-going junks.
Hoei Shin set sail across the Pacific for "Tahan" or "Great China" a little-known land said to be inhabited by a barbaric painted people, so named for their love of tattoos.
It is now known that he sought the Aleuts of the Bering Strait and Western Alaska, but prevailing currents and winds carried his expedition further south to the Pacific coast of North America.
Like a modern snowbird, Hoei Shin travelled southward down the coast until he found the congenital climate of present-day Mexico.
He documented the culture and history of the Mayans, centuries before the Aztecs.
He called the new land "Fusang" the name of a Chinese tree similar to the aloe he found there.
There were at least two subsequent explorations of west coast North America by the Chinese prior to Christopher Columbus, written about by Menzies.
The most significant for Canada was the voyage of Zhou Man in the15th century. He is believed to have explored the west coast from Vancouver Island to Ecuador.
In the early 21st century, Canada is China's closest friendly Western neighbour.
The wheat deals led directly to the 1970 diplomatic recognition of China by Canada, before the Americans.
Formal diplomatic ties lead within two years to collaboration on energy.
The Soviet Union, which had assist the People's Republic with oil development in the 1950s and1960s, abandoned the Chinese when they decided to make the Chinese an enemy and the Sino-Soviet border became a world hot spot.
So the Chinese turned to Canada in 1972 for help, first coming to this country to consult with Canadian petroleum geologists and engineers on several fields here similar to those in China.
This was followed up in the spring of 1973 by a Canadian mission to Chinese oil fields, including five exploration and production geologists and engineers, 13 equipment and field services executives and 15 Department of Energy and Geological Survey of Canada officials.
The Chinese did not meet Canadian hopes of sales of equipment and technology, or oil and gas concessions to explore and drill but, as participants in the mission later recounted, they picked the Canadians' brains and extended a warm hospitality which included meeting Chairman Mao's wife Jiang Qing, then the most powerful woman in the world and the second-ranked person in China.
Now China is banker to the world, experimenting with a mixed economy of state enterprises and private enterprise.
Chinese companies have invested broadly in Canadian oil and gas ventures -- sometimes buying Canadian-owned foreign assets such as Encana's petroleum and pipeline holdings in Ecuador and sometimes taking an interest in Canadian domestic production such as oil sands operations.
It is difficult to determine what international friendships mean in Chinese terms and whether the Chinese have a hidden agenda in relations with countries like Canada.
China is emerging as the next world power, with its strength measured in mercantile and financial terms and its iron military power gloved in the velvet cloth of commerce.
And access to oil sands production is just a small part of the relationship that China and Canada will have in the years ahead.
When there’s a gold rush on, smart people look for silver.
In the last few years, Canadian marketers have been retooling their organizations to target newcomers to the country. Ethnic media are bursting with ads targeting Chinese, Filipino and South Asian immigrants. (Or at least as bursting as media outlets are these days.) But there’s another group of newcomers, all but unknown and ignored, that some people believe present a sweet opportunity to savvy companies willing to learn another language: Hispanic-Canadians.
“Latin America is the fourth-largest source of immigration to Canada,” said Fabiola Sicard, the Toronto-based director of Latin markets for Bank of Nova Scotia, who is charged with convincing new Hispanic-Canadians to open accounts at her bank. On Wednesday evening, Ms. Sicard told a meeting of the Toronto Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that the number of immigrants from Latin American countries jumped by 121 per cent from the five-year periods of 1996-2000 to 2001-2006.
That much, at least, is known. But in sharp contrast to the U.S., where the Hispanic community is a 50 million-strong economic and political force that marketers study intently, their Canadian counterparts are practically invisible.
Chalk it up, said Ms. Sicard, to three obstacles: Hispanic-Canadians are a smaller market than other immigrant communities, they are geographically fragmented (stretching from the Venezuelan oil workers in Lethbridge, Alta., to IT professionals in Oakville, Ont., to dentists in Montreal), and there is almost no significant research that delves into their unique needs. Making matters worse, the eradication of Statistics Canada’s long-form census last year means the one half-decent source of information that marketers depended on is now gone.
But what little research exists suggests the Hispanic market – which numbers between 600,000 and 1.2 million, depending on the definition – is not just its own unique beast, but a valuable one.
Ms. Sicard presented Statscan data suggesting that, in contrast to the U.S. Hispanic community – which is stigmatized by its large proportion of illegal immigrants who have few English skills and a paucity of formal education – almost 50 per cent of Hispanic Canadians have at least a bachelor’s degree; another 12 per cent have a non-university diploma.
Which is why Scotiabank is making them a priority. While most Canadian banks provide special services to newcomers, from flexible accounts to Welcome Guides that provide basic information about citizenship, geography, customs and traditions, Ms. Sicard’s employer has identified Hispanic Canadians as an important growth market, especially for its StartRight bank accounts, which are tailored to the needs of newcomers.
But rather than using mainstream media to reach them, the bank is marketing at the grassroots, through professional associations, street festivals, and blogs aimed at people living in Latin American countries who are mulling a move north.
“We are targeting the Philippine and Hispanic community as well as the Chinese and South Asian communities,” Ms. Sicard said. “And guess what? We have more StartRight customers who speak Tagalog and Spanish than Mandarin or Punjabi. So the opportunity’s huge, because nobody’s targeting them, and everybody’s after the Chinese and South Asians.”
Still, there are reasons for caution.
“Chinese and South Asian are still the predominant groups,” said Bobby Sahni, the head of multicultural marketing for Rogers Communications Inc., who also addressed the THCC meeting. “So from a marketer’s perspective, obviously you’re going for scale, you’re trying to cover your big wins. That’s just the reality of any marketing – whether it’s multicultural, mass mainstream, or whatever – you want to get the biggest bang for your buck.”
But by focusing on the big fat targets, nimble marketers may be missing out on other opportunities. Ms. Sicard noted that, while Hispanics make up approximately 10 per cent of Canadian immigrants on an annual basis, they are overrepresented in Quebec, where they make up 20 per cent of immigrants.
“Within Montreal, it’s easier to target the Latin community,” Ms. Sicard said. “There, we offer a mortgage seminar in Spanish, 150 people show up. We don’t get that many attendees for our seminars in French or English. So that’s a big hit, just to provide it in Spanish.”
Best of all, she says, the Hispanic community is culturally cohesive, so marketers can avoid the pitfalls they encounter when trying to target other groups that may be riven by divisions. “You have a lot of people from Africa and the Middle East, but there are so many conflicts between them that it’s difficult to target and not offend another group. The advantage with Latinos in Montreal is that, just by marketing in Spanish, you cover them all and you don’t get in trouble.”
The Wednesday discussion included much breast-beating about the low profile of the Hispanic community in Canada. “We’re invisible,” complained Eduardo Uruena, founder and president of the local newspaper Diario El Popular. “It hurts.”
It may be that, before marketers pay attention to Hispanic-Canadians, the community is going to have to get better at marketing itself.
“When many of the Australian wines were starting to become popular in Canada, instead of Wolf Blass or Yellowtail or these different companies trying to take on the entire market and trying to build the profile and the brand of their wine alone, they actually unified and worked together to build the profile of Australian wines collectively,” Mr. Sahni noted.
“In the same case, whether it’s Hispanic media or Hispanic businesses – instead of trying to go at it on your own, I think there’s a lot of opportunity to work together.”
Until they do, they’ll be either invisible or mischaracterized. A few years ago, the mainstream Tex-Mex food brand Old El Paso aired an ad featuring Francesco Quinn (the Italian-born son of actor Anthony Quinn) laying on a thick Spanish accent while surrounded by chickens in a living room. It didn’t go over well among Hispanic-Canadians. “We are not that,” said Ms. Fabiola curtly. “There’s not a single Latin person I’ve asked about that ad who’s not mad about it.”
