Ted Pritchard / Herald Photo Carol MacCulloch of the Construction Association of Nova Scotia in her Burnside office: 'It's the stability of the employment opportunity and the dollars: That combination will lure people with high end skills.'

N.S. economy lacks heft to hang on to talented workers

By Bruce Erskine / Business Reporter SKILLS SHORTAGE

Nova Scotia will have to radically change working and wage conditions if it's going to bring skilled workers home to stay, says the president of the Construction Association of Nova Scotia.

Carol MacCulloch says the ability of skilled workers to write their own ticket on where they work and how much they're paid poses a serious challenge for small provinces like Nova Scotia.

It takes only one visit to the Alberta oil sands or Boston's Big Dig to find many highly skilled Nova Scotians who have been drawn by higher wages to areas with more vibrant economies.

"It's the stability of the employment opportunity and the dollars: That combination will lure people with high end skills," Ms. MacCulloch said. "They make really good wages, and if it's (a choice between) working for $18 an hour in Nova Scotia and maybe getting 12 weeks versus (making) $50 an hour for six months of steady work in Alberta and then coming home, a lot of them will go work in Alberta - and that's what happens.

"The scary part of that is that those are the guys with the highest level of credentials and the highest level of skill and the highest level of experience. We don't have enough of those industrial people to have two or three (major) projects going on in the region."

Elizabeth Beale, president and CEO of the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, said Nova Scotia will always have a skills shortage problem because the relatively small size of the province's economy makes it difficult to keep highly skilled people here long-term.

"Because we are a slow-growing province, the prospects for big employment growth are fairly limited - you'd need a radical shift in assumptions to think that Atlantic Canada or Nova Scotia would match growth rates we're now seeing in larger provinces like B.C., Alberta and Ontario," Ms. Beale said.

This is despite the fact that Halifax has a vibrant economy and there are new economic opportunities in northern Nova Scotia.

"The reality is that a large number of our highly skilled people will seek opportunities outside the province and Nova Scotia will not become a magnet for new immigration unless something changes," she said.

Both Ms. MacCulloch and Ms. Beale said more co-operation among the Maritime provinces could create economies of scale that might go a long way toward training and maintaining a large pool of skilled workers in the region.

"From a general point of view, I think that the three Maritime governments should do more together to integrate training across the region," said Ms. Beale, adding that there is a need to standardize regional skills accreditation to facilitate movement among regional institutions.

"It is really silly for three small provinces to be carrying out separate programs in all sectors," she said. "There's all sorts of areas, including some in the offshore (oil and gas sector), where it would be possible for people to do some training in one location - there's obvious efficiencies to be gained there."

Offering tax incentives to private firms that could provide skills training in-house might also help improve the situation.

Tim Nobes of Sigma Construction in Dartmouth said that while the out-migration of skilled workers is a legitimate concern, mobility is one of the attractions of working in the skilled-trades sector.

"Good guys roam, but they will settle," he said, noting that Nova Scotia doesn't experience the economic boom-and-bust cycles found in places like Toronto. "Guys will work here steadily, but we need to build up that (skilled worker) pool."

Stuart Gourley of the Education Department's skills and learning branch disagrees with the assertion that the province faces a perpetual skills shortage due to worker out-migration for more money or long-term work.

Nova Scotia can, with effort, compete effectively with the rest of the country for skilled workers, he said.

Peter O'Brien, recently retired Atlantic vice-president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said that as people age, quality of life becomes more important.

He said he believes more people in their 30s are returning to the province because of increasing economic opportunities closer to home.