First, what supply of labour is available today?

Second, what is the community’s capacity to increase this supply?

And third, how strong is the community’s potential to recruit talent from elsewhere?

Let me address each of these questions in turn.

My impression is that the bulk of what we think of as labour market information addresses the first of these three questions. Measuring information about the quantity and quality of available labour remains important, but as I have suggested already, it is increasingly difficult to do well in an era of fuzzy definitions and rapidly changing job functions. It is especially difficult to take this information and use it to project future demand for specific skill sets.

Let me offer an example from my own experience while I was president of the Canadian Association of Journalists in the early 1990s. Our focus was on creating opportunities for low-cost professional development for journalists. And in one workshop I attended, a participant asked the same question your ministers ask you: where are the jobs going to be?

The speaker replied that the fastest growing job category in journalism would be one that did not really exist yet. It was the first time I had heard the term "webmaster". That was just ten years ago, and we all know what has happened since. It is still important to gather whatever information we can, but we should not have any illusions about infallibility. When a job as ubiquitous as webmaster can evolve from nothing within a decade, it is futile to try to be too detailed in trying to project tomorrow’s labour market needs from the pattern of current demand. The jobs and their definitions are simply evolving too fast.

My second question, that of a community’s capacity to develop its existing skill base, really addresses its infrastructure for education and training. With today’s fuzzy and changing job descriptions, continuous learning is vital to maintaining as well as building a competitive labour force.

Large companies such as those that are members of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives are generally speaking enthusiastic investors in employee training. They understand that such investment is critical in boosting productivity and bottom-line performance. They also understand that a company’s willingness to invest in an employee’s skills has become an important factor in its ability to recruit and retain talent.

Smaller companies, on the other hand, face greater difficulties in providing training to employees. They have less money. It is more difficult to spare people from their day-to-day responsibilities. And perhaps most critical, they cannot cost-effectively carry out training in-house. They depend on the offerings of local educational institutions, from universities and colleges to private institutes and training centres as well as online resources.

Canada has made considerable investments in its educational infrastructure, investments that are reflected in our country’s highly educated labour force. The important issue in the context of today’s discussion is that in addition to making these investments, we need to measure and report on the capacity of these investments to affect the future supply of skilled labour.

Again, I would suggest that we should not worry too much about precision here. It has been said that half of the specific knowledge a computer science student acquires is obsolete within 18 months of graduation. And at the level of entrepreneurship, a study of graduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed very little correlation between their fields of study and the industries in which they founded businesses. What matters is the capacity to fuel people’s continuous need for learning.

Providing useful information about a community’s current labour market characteristics and about its capacity to develop over time will be difficult enough. But it is in answering my third question, the extent of a community’s ability to import talent, that matters get truly complex.

In a global economy, countries and communities within countries must work to attract investment from everywhere in the world. But people are a form of capital at least as important as money. And while people are not as mobile as financial instruments, countries and communities have to think hard about how to attract both.

My co-author Tom d’Aquino and I gave this challenge a lot of thought in our book Northern Edge: How Canadians Can Triumph in the Global Economy. In our interviews with dozens of Canada’s top business leaders, we heard repeated references to issues of employee mobility, some encouraging, some not. But perhaps the most striking example we came across of the link between investment and human mobility involved a major expansion by IBM in the late 1990s.

At that time, the multinational company decided to set up a single centre to provide technical support to customers across North America by telephone. This was a major operation, requiring about 1,500 highly trained people with computer science degrees and technical knowledge. Toronto made the short list on the basis of its plentiful supply of people with the necessary skills, and at competitive wage rates.

But what propelled Toronto to the top of the list in winning this investment was the fact that it could offer a deep pool of people with the necessary skills at competitive prices who also could deliver services to customers in 23 languages. In other words, Toronto’s ability to attract and integrate immigrants from many cultures around the world proved decisive in winning a major, high-technology investment.

In the global struggle to attract and retain skilled and mobile people, communities have to consider a staggeringly wide range of factors that affect both their ability to do a job from a particular location and their desire to live with their families in that community. For instance:

The quality of the educational infrastructure is important to companies both in terms of research partnerships and training; but it also matters to employees in terms of their own needs and the services available to their families.

Immigration rules can have a huge impact in either encouraging or discouraging people flows. Factors such as the ease of bringing recruits into Canada, the procedures for recognizing foreign credentials and the employment opportunities open to spouses and children can make or break a company’s recruitment efforts.

Financial factors including tax rates and the local cost of living have an obvious impact on decisions about whether to accept a job in a particular location.

The quality of transportation links, and especially the frequency, cost and convenience of air links, is important for both business and personal purposes. Managers today often need to visit customers, operations and investors across North America and around the world.

More broadly, the social and economic infrastructure, from the impact of highways on commuting times to the quality of health care, has an important effect on individual perceptions about whether to accept a move to a particular community.

No matter how attractive a professional opportunity may seem, people still ask themselves: "Is this a place I want to live with my family?" Quality of life matters.

Some of these quality of life factors are exceedingly difficult to measure. For instance, an important factor in retaining immigrants within a community appears to be the existence of social networks and supports, a critical mass of others with similar cultural or linguistic backgrounds.

For a major city such as Toronto, this is not a serious issue. For smaller centres, it can be a significant challenge, but experience suggests that it can be addressed. Winnipeg, for instance, has had notable success in boosting immigration and integrating immigrants successfully by focusing its efforts on a single source country.

Our research in the course of writing Northern Edge convinced us that however difficult the task may be, it is vital to keep this broader context in mind as Canada and Canadian communities plot their strategies for attracting people and money. And what we heard from Canadian business leaders and others in this country was reinforced by studies elsewhere.

One in particular stood out for me. In 1999, a company called Cognetics Inc., formed by a group of business and economic researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a study entitled "Entrepreneurial Hot Spots: The Best Places in America to Start and Grow a Company". This study focused on the factors that seemed most important to fostering the rapidly growing entrepreneurial companies that are the biggest drivers of job growth.

The study suggested that in the information economy, traditional factors such as unit labour costs had become all but irrelevant. Instead, it identified four "hard determinants" that are key to attracting and developing fast-growth companies.

They must have good universities.

They must have good airports.

They must have a good supply of skilled labour; and

They must be "a nice place to live".

I have already discussed the importance of each of these factors, including broad measures of quality of life. But the Cognetics study went one step further, and suggested that a set of "soft determinants" is at least as important as all the other factors combined in driving entrepreneurial business growth.

By soft determinants, it meant very fuzzy concepts like attitudes and culture. Trying to define such much less measure such concepts might seem impossible. But their impact can be real.

As Cognetics put it: "Not all communities welcome somewhat crazy upstarts who steal their customers and their labour force, and, in the process, become wealthier than anyone else in town — particularly if they let you know it. Said another way, tolerance and recognition of new and different people doing new and different things is the hallmark of a place in which entrepreneurs will start and grow companies. Such wild and crazy people want to be wanted. They want to be recognized and respected for what they have done. They will gravitate to places that revere them and will avoid places that treat them badly."

Can we measure social and cultural attitudes and reflect them with any accuracy in our overall picture of labour market information? Perhaps not. But I am sure that each of you could listen to the description I just read and give me a gut reaction as to how Canadian communities are likely to fare in competing to attract such talented and mobile people.

Collecting, analysing and disseminating labour market information. It is a tough job, and the work that each of you has done and will be doing in the months and years ahead is extremely valuable. You are the experts, and we in the business community are counting on you to keep thinking of new and better ways of informing employers, individuals and communities across this great country.

We will never have perfect information. In labour markets as in stock markets, we simply have to do the best we can. And if I have one thought that I would like to leave with you, it is this: as you discuss the challenge ahead, do not lose sight of the broader picture. I am not sure that developing a better picture of the competitiveness of our labour markets requires collecting a lot of new information, but I am certain that to be as effective as possible in competing for business investment, the country and individual communities need to pay more attention to the relationships across a wider network of data.

For all the complexities involved, this web of interlocking factors that I have described will be critical in driving Canada’s future employment growth and prosperity, and I wish you well in the two days of intense discussion that lie ahead.