After amusing the trout of the Bow River today and Monday with my hilarious imitation of a fly fisher, I drove back to Edmonton via MacLeod Trail, taking me just to the east of Calgary's downtown before rejoining Highway 2 northbound at 16th Ave. North and the Deerfoot Trail.
An eye-opening majority of fast-food joints and other service industry businesses had signs up looking for help, advertising either "above-average" or "top" wages.
One place gave its top rate at $11.40 per hour.*
* To pre-empt one potential line of mockery, no, I did not drop off my resume.
More seriously, I wonder how that compares to similar jobs in Ontario, especially Toronto. But when I first moved to T.O. in 2000, I remember riding the GO Train, and there was a middle-aged black woman with a Jamaican accent. "'Dis is a hard city," she told someone about life in T.O.. "You got to work, two, t'ree jobs just to survive."
I gotta get a digital camera. The tableaux of help wanted ads would have made for a bizarre little slide show (as an added bonus, I would have thrown in the image of a bench ad for a real estate agent with the last name of Wacko. :) ).
At the same time, given the rapid ascension of Calgary's rents into the Torontosphere, you're still left with not enough to live on.
While making the right turn onto Centre St., Calgary's local CBC Radio newscast had a story on how a group of seven municipalities wants the provincial government to do more for the working homeless. An excerpt:
Community leaders from across Alberta want $20 million from the province to help battle homelessness.
Alberta's boom is pushing the cost of housing up so fast that the province is developing "a class of working poor" — people who have jobs but can't afford a place to live, the leaders of seven Alberta municipalities on Monday told a Conservative committee studying the problem.
The municipalities say they're already committing as much as their citizens can afford, and extra money is needed immediately to help fund local outreach and social services.
"There's no time to waste when you are dealing with people's lives," Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel said at the legislature. "Put the kind of money into it that's necessary because if you don't spend it now, you're going to spend a whole bunch later on [the] problems of crime on the streets and … other issues that are far more expensive."
A related story reports that students in Edmonton and Calgary are having a hard time finding affordable housing.
Another figure I heard is that Calgary's (Alberta's?) inflation rate is 5.2 per cent (I'll look for the reference).
By coincidence, The Globe and Mail had a series of stories on Monday about the coming shortage of workers including the current one in Alberta.
The main story opened with a poor fellow who had to shut down his new resto in Olds, Alta. because he couldn't keep it staffed (I ran into one business on this short trip that apologized for restricting its hours, but said it didn't have the staff to stay open longer). An excerpt:
The signs of Alberta's growth are stunning.
There's the seemingly endless parade of eager newcomers. There's the economic fire that nothing can douse.
Wages and perks now defy all conventional human-resources wisdom. And real-estate prices are starting to make even Vancouver look affordable. But, as Mr. Marshall recently found out, there are also growing pains. Overworked funeral-home directors, empty liquor-store shelves and women's shelters filled with abused women desperate for a roof over their heads as the population surges, point to a deepening labour shortage and a housing crunch.
The province and the private sector are scrambling to come up with stop-gap measures before the boom goes bust and Alberta's super-charged economy implodes.
"An overheated economy with labour shortages is definitely a better problem to have than 15-per-cent unemployment and everyone going bankrupt," said Todd Hirsh, chief economist with the Canada West Foundation. "But that doesn't mean it's not without its challenges."
By any measure, Alberta's growth and wealth in recent years are staggering, especially when compared with the rest of the country.
The province's surplus hit a record $10-billion in 2005-06 (the original projection was $1.5-billion). For the 2006-07 year, Alberta announced record program spending of $28-billion and another big unbudgeted surplus of $4.1-billion, which is the highest initial projection in the province's history.
This summer, the Conference Board of Canada predicted that Alberta will lead the nation's growth this year, expanding by 6.6 per cent, compared with a national growth rate of 3.1 per cent.
Driven by commodity prices, especially oil, which the board expects will hover above $65 (U.S.) a barrel for the next five years, it says Alberta's boom is not a "temporary phenomenon" but a "permanent structural change in the economy."
According to the board, Alberta's per capita income for 2007 is expected to reach $44,788, compared with the national average forecast at $34,757.
During the first quarter of this year, Alberta's population climbed by 0.78 of a percentage point, or three times the national average of 0.24 per cent. About 25,900 people were added to the tally, including a net gain of 15,600 who moved from other provinces. Both increases set record highs for the first three months of the year.
More than 3.3 million people now live in Alberta, making it the fourth-largest province in the country by population.
But the massive population boom hasn't been enough to feed the economy's need for workers. The province recently released a 10-year work-force strategy that found that Alberta will need 86,000 workers in everything from trades to health care, professionals, and the retail and service sectors.
If nothing changes, the board worried earlier this year, by 2025 Alberta will face a shortfall of 332,000 workers. Already, the provincial economy is adjusting to avoid that kind of gap. But the casualties connected to it are mounting.
Mind you, someone noted in a letter to the editor:
However bad the labour shortage in the emerging land of milk and honey may be, the real downside is the devastating environmental consequences of the tar-sands project, on people and biodiversity world-wide, and on future generations in Alberta.
But that's another discussion. Here's some of the other Globe stories, most of which take a more national look:
When home is not where the jobs are
Moving west to work tears apart families; Employers say mobile employees don't stayPlenty of work, not enough bodies
Labour woes in the West are showing up elsewhere as companies try to get by with lessAmid jobs boom, hundreds of thousands left behind
Prospective employers can still shun applicants who don't perfectly fit the bill.
Now, with all of this moaning and groaning, I should note that I saw ads for condos in downtown Edmonton on Jasper Ave. starting at $90,000.
Shoebox condos in downtown T.O. start at about $180,000; however, T.O. salaries are still higher, I suspect.
While my priority out here is decompressing, I'm going to poke around a bit more on this affordability issue.
Afterthoughts
I also saw a "We're hiring!" bumper sticker on a Calgary Police Service cruiser.
The town of Leduc is close to Edmonton International Airport, and that's where I picked up my rental car on Friday.
Before I'd driven two blocks, I saw three businesses advertising that they were looking for welders.
Lord knows how many "we're hiring" signs I would have seen had I taken a spin through Nisku Industrial Park, which is about eight to 10 kilometres north of Leduc.
This reminds me of the late 1970s, when if you wanted a job on a drilling rig, just sit in a small-town Alberta bar for an afternoon. :)
Update
The search for service workers extends out to towns like Hinton and Edson. Businesses there are crying out for clerks! :)