Preparing Now for the Labour Needs of Tomorrow

June 16, 2009

We’ve got a big problem in this country.  I’m not talking about the hundreds of thousands of jobs being lost in our manufacturing sector.  I’m not talking about a $50 billion federal deficit this year.  I’m not talking about the impact of Buy American on our exporters, or the fact you now need a passport to go cross-border shopping.

Don’t get me wrong.  Canada-United States relations, deficits and recession are all serious issues with very real consequences. But I am more worried about what happens next; about what happens after this recession ends; about how we will keep our economy growing when we have only two people in the labour force for every three jobs that need doing.

For now, of course, governments are back to focusing on the standard three priorities in any recession: jobs, jobs, jobs.
There’s nothing wrong with that in the short term.  People are hurting, and governments should be there to help.

But the inescapable reality is that recession — no matter how nasty — does not stop any of us from aging.  (If anything, its challenges often seem to make us age faster!)  But every 24 hours, we each get a day older.

So as the economy turns up again — and it will — we will move much faster than most Canadian expect from an economy without enough jobs for our people to one in which we will not have enough people for the work that needs doing.

Before we plunged so abruptly into a global downturn, companies across a wide range of industries already were having difficulty finding people with the skills they needed.

Shortages were worst in sectors like the oil patch, where the booming oil sands were sucking up skilled trades people from coast to coast.   But you could see the shortages cropping up across sectors, across regions and among large and small businesses alike.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) estimated that in 2007, 309,000 jobs at small businesses remained vacant for at least four months.

Even today, in the midst of the worst global downturn since the Second World War, there are jobs going begging.  In the Kitchener-Waterloo region, the four largest technologies companies alone need to fill 2,000 positions in the next 12 months.

Amid the carnage of the global financial crisis, Canada’s financial services sector has gained a reputation as perhaps the best managed and best regulated in the world — which means that our banks and insurance companies are hiring.

What this means is that the late-1990s phrase “war for talent” will be back with a vengeance as the economy emerges from the current downturn.  This has fundamental implications for both corporate strategy and public policy.

Canada is fortunate in having one of the most highly skilled labour forces in the world.  Our rate of participation in post-secondary education is second to none.  This provides a huge competitive advantage.  But we will not maintain or strengthen this advantage without serious additional effort.

What we have to recognize is that the relentless advance of technology means that a growing share of the work that needs doing can be done almost anywhere.   In manufacturing and services alike, supply chains are global — and unlike deposits of minerals or oil, people can move.

To attract business investment in highly paid work, Canadian communities need to offer a good supply of highly skilled people — and be places in which such people want to continue to live and work.

To meet this challenge through public policy, Canada must work on three fronts.

First, to make our communities attractive places to invest, Canada must continue to develop its supply of skilled people.

Governments must act on their responsibility to make the most of Canada’s human potential.  We must ensure that every young Canadian finishes secondary school and moves on to some form of post-secondary learning.  Employers must do their part by enabling employees to continue building their skills throughout their careers.

To put it bluntly, we cannot afford to waste a single Canadian mind.  This always has been a moral imperative for Canadians as a society.  It is now an economic imperative as well.

Second, we have to retain the skilled people we develop by offering a high quality of life.  There are many paths toward this goal, but all boil down to a careful balancing act between high quality public services and attractive tax rates — perceived value for money is the key here.

Finally, the subject of our session today, we must attract more people through our immigration policies.

Strong flows of immigration from every corner of the world have been the key to Canada’s economic success and the foundation of our vibrant multicultural society.  Our aging population means that we will be more dependent than ever on immigration for future labour force growth.  But we cannot take this source of talent for granted.

The rest of the industrialized world is in the same boat and will be competing more vigorously for skilled people.  And the explosion of economic growth in traditional source countries like China and India is creating a host of new reasons for people in those countries to seek better lives at home instead of here.

For now, at least, Canada enjoys a highly diverse labour force, and this represents an important competitive advantage.

But as demographics drive growing labour shortages in Canada and across the industrialized world, our country must move more aggressively to target key sources of potential immigrants and to enable employers to recruit from abroad with a minimum of cost and delay.

All levels of government, together with business, academia and community organizations, then must ensure that immigrants are able to put their full knowledge and skills to good use as quickly as possible.  We must recognize the valuable skills embedded in foreign credentials.  We must identify skill gaps and enable immigrants to fill these gaps quickly.

The good news is that this is not one of those contentious existential questions like how many weeks of EI it takes to qualify for a summer without election signs.   There is a broad consensus on what needs doing, and it goes well beyond public policy.  All of us must be engaged in making it happen.

We in the private sector certainly have to do our part, and John Patti of CGI will talk next about the role of immigration within his company’s strategy for growth.

Employers have to work harder to identify and recruit immigrants, especially those already living within our borders.  And we will need to expand our own investments in training, to help bridge the gaps between the pool of available talent and the specific knowledge and skills each enterprise needs to innovate and grow.

Governments of course have crucial roles to play, both in setting public policy and providing tools and services. Perhaps the most important role for governments is to encourage and enable the amazing energies and capabilities that already exist within our communities.

Corinne Prince St-Amand and her people at the Foreign Credentials Referral Office are driving progress on one of the most difficult issues that businesses face in recruiting immigrants, and the Employer’s Roadmap that Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenny is launching today marks an important step forward.

I believe that we are moving in the right direction.  I just worry that the current downturn has blunted our sense of urgency.  We are quite properly concerned today about how to help those who are losing jobs to the recession.  But we cannot afford to ignore the long-term reality that Canada faces.

Our economy is shifting from one that is cyclically short of jobs to one that will be structurally short of skilled labour.  In that environment, the standard of living of all Canadians will depend less on the quantity of jobs we create and much more on the quality and value of the work that Canadians are doing.  We need to be preparing now to make sure Canada is ready for this shift.