Saskatchewan's booming economy was creating jobs for women, youth, aboriginals and workers over 60 at a faster rate than the labour force as a whole last year.
For example, the number of women participating in the workforce increased by 3.5 per cent in 2006 -- more than three times the growth of the provincial labour force.
Similarly, off-reserve aboriginals saw a 12-per-cent increase in employment last year, while youth unemployment dropped from 10.1 per cent in 2005 to 8.6 per cent in 2006.
But the largest increase in employment was in the 60-64 age group at 12.1 per cent, followed by workers over 70 years of age, who saw a six-per-cent increase in employment last year.
These are the results of a Chartered Accountants of Saskatchewan survey. This makes the option of foreign recruitment that much more attractive.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Sun Rises in the West...
According to a news story in Canwest papers by Eric Beauchesne, the seven fastest-growing cities are in Western Canada
OTTAWA - The economic gap between eastern and western Canadian cities continues to widen, according to the Conference Board of Canada's latest outlook for 13 cities across the country.
"Although economic growth has been uneven between eastern and western cities for several years, 2007 is turning out to be a year in which the East-West disparity in economic growth is the greatest," said Mario Lefebvre, director of the board's metropolitan outlook service.
Led by Saskatoon and Calgary, the seven western cities included in the survey are expected to grow faster than all six eastern Canadian metropolitan areas, the report said.
With after-inflation growth of 4.7 per cent, Saskatoon will dethrone Calgary as the fastest growing city economy this year, it added.
"The provincewide influx of interprovincial migrants into Saskatchewan, due to lower costs of living and a strong overall economic performance, is benefiting Saskatoon's housing sector," the report said.
Widespread gains will drive growth in Regina this year to a decade-high 3.5 per cent, it added.
Edmonton's economy is not growing as fast this year as it did in 2006 when the economy expanded 6.4 per cent, but healthy growth of 3.6 per cent is still forecast, said the report, crediting still robust construction, particularly on the non-residential front, and soaring consumer spending.
The city's growth rate is expected to hit 3.9 per cent in 2008-2011, tied with Toronto and trailing only Calgary at 4.3 per cent.
Calgary, the leader over the past two years, will slip to second this year with 4.4-per-cent growth, which, while down from last year's spectacular 7.7-per-cent, is more sustainable, the Conference Board said.
With all sectors of the city's economy performing well, job growth will remain strong, leading to an eight-per-cent increase in retail sales.
Winnipeg's economy is also firing on all cylinders, driving growth to 3.7 per cent, the strongest performance since 1998, the report said, adding that construction will be an important contributor to growth thanks to major infrastructure spending and rising housing starts.
Growth this year will also moderate in Vancouver to 2.9 per cent and Victoria to 2.8 from 3.7 per cent for both cities last year, reflecting a stagnant manufacturing sector in Vancouver and a decline in housing construction and American tourists in Victoria.
Meanwhile, further setbacks in the manufacturing sector are derailing the recovery of eastern cities, the think-tank said.
"The strong Canadian dollar and weak U.S. demand have dampened Toronto's outlook," it said, forecasting growth of 2.7 per cent, which it described as well below potential for the country's largest metropolitan economy.
In contrast to most eastern Canadian CMAs, Quebec City's manufacturing sector has expanded this year and last, but housing starts are shrinking, limiting growth to 2.6 per cent this year.
Halifax's economy will follow with a 2.5-per-cent expansion, as strong growth in services and a rebound in manufacturing sector help offset slow growth in housing and weakening construction.
The national capital metropolitan region is experiencing a modest economic slowdown this year to 2.3 per cent, due to the end of the federal government's hiring spree and sluggish construction activity, the report said.
Ongoing weakness in manufacturing, offset in part by growth in services and non-residential construction, will limit Montreal's economy to just 2.1-per-cent growth this year.
Although the services sector and construction activity are doing well, the manufacturing outlook for the steel city continues to drag Hamilton's economy down; real GDP growth is forecast to come in at 1.3 per cent this year.
ALL IN THE WEST
Projected 2007 growth:
Saskatoon 4.7%
Calgary 4.4
Winnipeg 3.7
Edmonton 3.6
Regina 3.5
Source: Conference Board of Canada
OTTAWA - The economic gap between eastern and western Canadian cities continues to widen, according to the Conference Board of Canada's latest outlook for 13 cities across the country.
"Although economic growth has been uneven between eastern and western cities for several years, 2007 is turning out to be a year in which the East-West disparity in economic growth is the greatest," said Mario Lefebvre, director of the board's metropolitan outlook service.
Led by Saskatoon and Calgary, the seven western cities included in the survey are expected to grow faster than all six eastern Canadian metropolitan areas, the report said.
With after-inflation growth of 4.7 per cent, Saskatoon will dethrone Calgary as the fastest growing city economy this year, it added.
"The provincewide influx of interprovincial migrants into Saskatchewan, due to lower costs of living and a strong overall economic performance, is benefiting Saskatoon's housing sector," the report said.
Widespread gains will drive growth in Regina this year to a decade-high 3.5 per cent, it added.
Edmonton's economy is not growing as fast this year as it did in 2006 when the economy expanded 6.4 per cent, but healthy growth of 3.6 per cent is still forecast, said the report, crediting still robust construction, particularly on the non-residential front, and soaring consumer spending.
The city's growth rate is expected to hit 3.9 per cent in 2008-2011, tied with Toronto and trailing only Calgary at 4.3 per cent.
Calgary, the leader over the past two years, will slip to second this year with 4.4-per-cent growth, which, while down from last year's spectacular 7.7-per-cent, is more sustainable, the Conference Board said.
With all sectors of the city's economy performing well, job growth will remain strong, leading to an eight-per-cent increase in retail sales.
Winnipeg's economy is also firing on all cylinders, driving growth to 3.7 per cent, the strongest performance since 1998, the report said, adding that construction will be an important contributor to growth thanks to major infrastructure spending and rising housing starts.
Growth this year will also moderate in Vancouver to 2.9 per cent and Victoria to 2.8 from 3.7 per cent for both cities last year, reflecting a stagnant manufacturing sector in Vancouver and a decline in housing construction and American tourists in Victoria.
Meanwhile, further setbacks in the manufacturing sector are derailing the recovery of eastern cities, the think-tank said.
"The strong Canadian dollar and weak U.S. demand have dampened Toronto's outlook," it said, forecasting growth of 2.7 per cent, which it described as well below potential for the country's largest metropolitan economy.
In contrast to most eastern Canadian CMAs, Quebec City's manufacturing sector has expanded this year and last, but housing starts are shrinking, limiting growth to 2.6 per cent this year.
Halifax's economy will follow with a 2.5-per-cent expansion, as strong growth in services and a rebound in manufacturing sector help offset slow growth in housing and weakening construction.
The national capital metropolitan region is experiencing a modest economic slowdown this year to 2.3 per cent, due to the end of the federal government's hiring spree and sluggish construction activity, the report said.
Ongoing weakness in manufacturing, offset in part by growth in services and non-residential construction, will limit Montreal's economy to just 2.1-per-cent growth this year.
Although the services sector and construction activity are doing well, the manufacturing outlook for the steel city continues to drag Hamilton's economy down; real GDP growth is forecast to come in at 1.3 per cent this year.
ALL IN THE WEST
Projected 2007 growth:
Saskatoon 4.7%
Calgary 4.4
Winnipeg 3.7
Edmonton 3.6
Regina 3.5
Source: Conference Board of Canada
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Worker shortage in Red Deer becomes acute
The Canadian Press reported yesterday that the Couche Tard Chain is going to great lengths to recruit workers in Red Deer.
Faced with a labour shortage in Alberta, Alimentation Couche-Tard (TSX:ATD.B) is recruiting in Ontario and the Maritimes for its convenience stores and is offering enticements such as apartments and regular flights back home to job seekers.
The Quebec-based convenience store operator is also offering potential employees the shared use of a car and the possibility of winning a cash prize, the annual meeting was told Wednesday.
CEO Alain Bouchard told shareholders these incentives are paying off.
He said Couche-Tard has been able to keep its doors open at night and on Sundays while its competitors have been forced to close down for those shifts due to a lack of staff.
"Our competitors are closing early," Bouchard said. "We're not."
Couche-Tard pays $9 hourly in Quebec while it pays staff $12 to $14 an hour in Alberta.
Bouchard said Couche-Tard executives in Alberta had to find other ways to attract and retain staff.
"They are recruiting in places where people are looking for work, such as Toronto, and they offer an apartment, shared use of a car, regular flights home and participation in a lottery for cash awards."
The hot Alberta economy, he said, has a down side.
"The economy is so strong right now that casual wages are sky-high and the labour pool is empty," he said, adding that out-of-the-ordinary solutions needed to be found.
Although the labour shortage is most acute in oil-rich Alberta, many sectors of the economy in other parts of the country are also finding it difficult to find workers.
According to the latest monthly figures from Statistics Canada, the national unemployment rate was just 6.0 per cent in July, the lowest since 1974.
Couche-Tard operates more than 5,500 convenience stores throughout North America, is aiming to nudge the 6,000-mark in fiscal 2008.
The company has said it intends to build 60 stores and purchase approximately 250 others throughout the year.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Peacekeeping is changing
Interesting Canadian Press article on the changing nature of Peacekeeping:
JOHN WARD -OTTAWA (CP) - The iconic peacekeeping missions of the past, with blue berets on a ceasefire line, so beloved by the Canadian public, are likely gone forever, lost in a harsher world.
Experts say missions of the future are likely to be more muscular - like Afghanistan - and will mesh a heavily armed military, humanitarian agencies, diplomats and politicians in an uneasy, but vital alliance. Combat may be a necessity, if only to provide security for relief workers and reconstruction efforts.
The handwriting has likely been on the wall for a decade, from the days that Canadian soldiers fought pitched battles in the former Yugoslavia, with little publicity at home among a public content with the peacekeeper image forged in quieter times.
The Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, founded in 1984 to be a sort of institutional memory for peacekeeping methods and lessons, brought university students, soldiers, bureaucrats and humanitarian experts together last week to run a role-playing exercise about a peacekeeping mission in the fictional country of Fontanalis.
This mission, like the operation in Afghanistan, suggested to the participants that times have changed since the early days of UN peacekeeping.
Flora MacDonald, former Tory politician and onetime foreign affairs minister, played the role of a senior UN bureaucrat in the exercise. She said in an interview that the old days are gone.
"Everything has changed," she said. "Peacekeeping has changed. You can't equate the 1970s or 1980s with today or the next few years. You have to recognize that nothing is static."
Col. Pat Stogran, who led the 3rd battalion of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry into Afghanistan in 2002, is a serving officer seconded temporarily to the peacekeeping centre. He agrees that there's a new world to be dealt with.
"We used to fight wars in three ranks and colourful clothing, then we went into trenches and then we went into mechanized warfare," he said.
Now the world sees insurgents able to use the Internet and stage attacks unthinkable a few years earlier.
"The world has changed and the nature of the threat has changed. You can't hope to go back to the old way of peacekeeping when conflict has changed so much."
Lew MacKenzie, the retired major general who led Canadian soldiers to occupy the Sarajevo airport in the 1990s, said the players have changed, as well as the methods.
He noted that a senior UN official said recently that the world body simply is incapable of running a major mission where deadly force is required. The UN has always had problems with its member states when it comes to authorizing the use of any force beyond simple self-defence.
Where the UN once negotiated with countries, MacKenzie added, today's peacekeepers must deal with far more shadowy groups.
"The change after the Cold War was that factions were involved," he said.
"They don't have a flag in front of the UN building. They don't have a delegation. If you make a deal with them and they break the deal, where do you go to find them? They've disappeared."
But whatever the methods, it will still be peacekeeping, said Maurice Baril, a retired general, former military adviser to the UN secretary general and onetime chief of Canada's defence staff. "War has changed and we still call it war," he said. "We haven't invented a new word.
"It seems because peacekeeping has changed some would like to give it another name, some would like to call it war.
"Well, it's not the same. You go to war to win a battle and win whatever aim you have.
In modern peacekeeping, he said, you may have to fight insurgents to a standstill, but that's not fighting a war.
One challenge, these experts say, is getting the Canadian public, which is caught up in what MacKenzie calls the peacekeeping myth, to recognize today's efforts are as important and praiseworthy as those of the past.
"Successive governments have perpetrated this peacekeeping myth, that it's No. 1 in our priorities, for government self-interest because you can chop defence budgets if you think it's just blue berets and pistols."
Chief Superintendant Graham Muir of the RCMP, who has served with the UN mission in Haiti, agreed that Canadians have to learn about the new model.
"They still effectively are consumers of yesterday's message."
He pointed out that when it comes to UN peacekeeping missions - outside of Afghanistan, which is a United Nations-sanctioned mission under NATO - Canada has more policemen serving than soldiers.
In the early 1990s, thousands of Canadian troops were serving in UN missions. Today there are fewer than 100.
Some of the students taking part in the Pearson exercise said they learned a great deal about running a peace mission in an unstable country.
For one thing, anything that can go wrong, will. The scenario is littered with figurative booby traps that pop up just as things seem to be going well: aid trucks are hijacked; avian flu breaks out; convoys are attacked.
"Every time we start to address one problem, something else comes up that's more pressing or seems more important," said Carrie Dyson of Toronto, a student at Humber College.
What has shes learned?
"There has to be greater co-ordination between military and humanitarian NGOs. What we are learning is to combine both efforts as much as possible."
Clayton Dennison from the University of Calgary said Canadians have to understand that peacekeeping may involve fighting.
"People think we're peacekeepers, that's been our tradition, but we have to understand that the world has changed and in a lot of regions of the world you're not going to have the armed combatants agreeing to let peacekeepers in.
"But we still have to go in anyway."
Stogran said he's confident Canadians will understand the new world.
"Canadians throw themselves into things, the First World War, the Second World War, NATO and the watershed peacekeeping missions of the 1990s because they're interested in keeping the peace, in international stability, being a part of it."
JOHN WARD -OTTAWA (CP) - The iconic peacekeeping missions of the past, with blue berets on a ceasefire line, so beloved by the Canadian public, are likely gone forever, lost in a harsher world.
Experts say missions of the future are likely to be more muscular - like Afghanistan - and will mesh a heavily armed military, humanitarian agencies, diplomats and politicians in an uneasy, but vital alliance. Combat may be a necessity, if only to provide security for relief workers and reconstruction efforts.
The handwriting has likely been on the wall for a decade, from the days that Canadian soldiers fought pitched battles in the former Yugoslavia, with little publicity at home among a public content with the peacekeeper image forged in quieter times.
The Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, founded in 1984 to be a sort of institutional memory for peacekeeping methods and lessons, brought university students, soldiers, bureaucrats and humanitarian experts together last week to run a role-playing exercise about a peacekeeping mission in the fictional country of Fontanalis.
This mission, like the operation in Afghanistan, suggested to the participants that times have changed since the early days of UN peacekeeping.
Flora MacDonald, former Tory politician and onetime foreign affairs minister, played the role of a senior UN bureaucrat in the exercise. She said in an interview that the old days are gone.
"Everything has changed," she said. "Peacekeeping has changed. You can't equate the 1970s or 1980s with today or the next few years. You have to recognize that nothing is static."
Col. Pat Stogran, who led the 3rd battalion of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry into Afghanistan in 2002, is a serving officer seconded temporarily to the peacekeeping centre. He agrees that there's a new world to be dealt with.
"We used to fight wars in three ranks and colourful clothing, then we went into trenches and then we went into mechanized warfare," he said.
Now the world sees insurgents able to use the Internet and stage attacks unthinkable a few years earlier.
"The world has changed and the nature of the threat has changed. You can't hope to go back to the old way of peacekeeping when conflict has changed so much."
Lew MacKenzie, the retired major general who led Canadian soldiers to occupy the Sarajevo airport in the 1990s, said the players have changed, as well as the methods.
He noted that a senior UN official said recently that the world body simply is incapable of running a major mission where deadly force is required. The UN has always had problems with its member states when it comes to authorizing the use of any force beyond simple self-defence.
Where the UN once negotiated with countries, MacKenzie added, today's peacekeepers must deal with far more shadowy groups.
"The change after the Cold War was that factions were involved," he said.
"They don't have a flag in front of the UN building. They don't have a delegation. If you make a deal with them and they break the deal, where do you go to find them? They've disappeared."
But whatever the methods, it will still be peacekeeping, said Maurice Baril, a retired general, former military adviser to the UN secretary general and onetime chief of Canada's defence staff. "War has changed and we still call it war," he said. "We haven't invented a new word.
"It seems because peacekeeping has changed some would like to give it another name, some would like to call it war.
"Well, it's not the same. You go to war to win a battle and win whatever aim you have.
In modern peacekeeping, he said, you may have to fight insurgents to a standstill, but that's not fighting a war.
One challenge, these experts say, is getting the Canadian public, which is caught up in what MacKenzie calls the peacekeeping myth, to recognize today's efforts are as important and praiseworthy as those of the past.
"Successive governments have perpetrated this peacekeeping myth, that it's No. 1 in our priorities, for government self-interest because you can chop defence budgets if you think it's just blue berets and pistols."
Chief Superintendant Graham Muir of the RCMP, who has served with the UN mission in Haiti, agreed that Canadians have to learn about the new model.
"They still effectively are consumers of yesterday's message."
He pointed out that when it comes to UN peacekeeping missions - outside of Afghanistan, which is a United Nations-sanctioned mission under NATO - Canada has more policemen serving than soldiers.
In the early 1990s, thousands of Canadian troops were serving in UN missions. Today there are fewer than 100.
Some of the students taking part in the Pearson exercise said they learned a great deal about running a peace mission in an unstable country.
For one thing, anything that can go wrong, will. The scenario is littered with figurative booby traps that pop up just as things seem to be going well: aid trucks are hijacked; avian flu breaks out; convoys are attacked.
"Every time we start to address one problem, something else comes up that's more pressing or seems more important," said Carrie Dyson of Toronto, a student at Humber College.
What has shes learned?
"There has to be greater co-ordination between military and humanitarian NGOs. What we are learning is to combine both efforts as much as possible."
Clayton Dennison from the University of Calgary said Canadians have to understand that peacekeeping may involve fighting.
"People think we're peacekeepers, that's been our tradition, but we have to understand that the world has changed and in a lot of regions of the world you're not going to have the armed combatants agreeing to let peacekeepers in.
"But we still have to go in anyway."
Stogran said he's confident Canadians will understand the new world.
"Canadians throw themselves into things, the First World War, the Second World War, NATO and the watershed peacekeeping missions of the 1990s because they're interested in keeping the peace, in international stability, being a part of it."
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Changes to the Federal Government's Temporary Foreign Worker Program
The Federal Government has announced some improvements to its Temporary Foreign Worker Program here.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Back From Lethbridge
I spent 3 days in Lethbridge last week at a conference for employers interested in hiring foreign workers which was organized by the provincial government. The presentations were very good and I met several very interesting employers facing similar hurdles in Alberta's tight labour market. I am hoping to re-connect with these folks over the next few weeks to see if we can create some win-win situations and place some Ukrainian workers with them.
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