June 19, 2007

Skilled Labour

Educators sign on to alleviate skills shortage

Atlantic construction symposium addresses labour supply issues

PAUL HALPERN

correspondent

HALIFAX

Nova Scotia’s Minister of Economic Development Richard Hurlburt knows first hand what the skilled labour crunch means to the construction industry.

“My son in little old Yarmouth has the same stresses as anyone else in construction,” the former building contractor told the Atlantic Construction Symposium. “He needs workers; he needs younger workers.”

The symposium at the Nova Scotia Community College’s new LEED silver-certified waterfront campus building in Dartmouth, NS, was held in response to the June 12 release of two Construction Sector Council (CSC) Construction Looking Forward reports: the “base case” Labour Requirements from 2007 to 2015 for Atlantic Canada and the “high case” Atlantic Canada Major Projects Investment Scenario.

Ernie Stokes and Bill Empey of CSC described the “base case” report as an analysis of regional and provincial workforce requirements for 2007 to 2015, based on 31 CSC-recognized trades analyzed on a per trade/per province basis.

The “high case” report is similarly structured, but superimposes the impacts of several potential large industrial and engineering projects onto the base case.

Hurlburt’s comment could have summed up the reports’ main conclusions: Atlantic Canada, and the nation as a whole, need solutions both to relieve a tight current labour market for skilled construction trades and to train and keep a skilled workforce for the future.

The education sector has “to make sure that you have what you need when you need it,” said NSCC President Joan McArthur-Blair.

“You should never hesitate to bid on a project because you’re not sure if you’ll have the manpower you’ll need. This is collective work that we need to do in profound partnership.”

To meet that mandate, McArthur-Blair said industry must make its requirements known.

One message she has received has been to “stop siloing the trades.

“They don’t work in isolation from each other and they shouldn’t be trained that way.”

She cited the detailed data provided in the CSC reports as the kind of information that enables education and industry to partner successfully.

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