By Tara Carman, Vancouver Sun | Link to Article
“Those with a job offer, when a Canadian is not found … will have an almost automatic claim on our immigration system.”
Federal Immigration Minister Chris Alexander
By Tara Carman, Vancouver Sun | Link to Article
“Those with a job offer, when a Canadian is not found … will have an almost automatic claim on our immigration system.”
Federal Immigration Minister Chris Alexander
B.C. will see a million job openings by 2020 — most within the next three years — and it will be necessary to look beyond Canada’s borders to fill many of them, says the province’s deputy jobs minister.
There are 47 projects worth half-a-billion dollars or more on the books in the province today, Dave Byng told a business audience in Vancouver on Friday. Three quarters of the work associated with them will be in northern B.C., and most are related to liquefied natural gas.
The projects will create two streams of jobs — construction and operations, he said.
The construction jobs are likely to be temporary in nature, peaking in 2016 and tapering off by 2018, Byng said. The operations jobs will start to come online as the projects are built and likely to be longer-term in nature, he added.
The government’s priority is to make sure that B.C. residents have first crack at those jobs, and to make sure schools and post-secondary institutions produce graduates to fill them, Byng said. But he predicted that the province would not be able to supply all of those workers.
The next step is to look across Canada, and several Eastern Canadian provinces have already expressed interest in sending B.C. their workers, he said.
After that, it will be necessary for the province to look offshore because employers, particularly in the LNG industry, need to be able to access specific skill sets quickly. This is where temporary foreign workers are likely to play a role, especially in the construction jobs, he said.
Byng acknowledged that the controversial temporary workers program has got “a little bit of a black eye” recently.
“There continue to be issues that percolate to the top, but the reality of it is, if we look at the projects that we’ve got going here in British Columbia, there will be a continued need and demand for access to temporary labour both from across Canada and from outside our borders,” he said. “And so you’ll most certainly see the province speaking from that perspective and working hard to ensure … access to temporary foreign workers.”
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/will+need+look+overseas+fill+some+expected+million+openings/9675474/story.html#ixzz2xflGpC00