ROB MURRAY: I’m speaking with Michel Dufresne from the Job Resource Centre in the Bow Valley. You’ve just released your Fall Labour Market Review, something you do on a biannual basis. A lot of interesting takeaways. Do you want to preface this?

MICHEL DUFRESNE: It’s been a very interesting year and a half. This one covers the summer of 2021 and the spring as well. We were notorious for staff shortages but this summer took the cake, that’s for sure.

RM: As part of the report, you said it was a bit of an anomaly with indicators that typically don’t occur simultaneously – high unemployment rate as well as severe staff shortages. What do you attribute that to?

MD: There’s a lot of anecdotal information. Ideas like – we don’t have the foreigners in Canada, so no Australians, no Europeans. Also Canadians – no French Canadians and people from Ontario did not travel here to look for jobs. Early in the pandemic we lost all those people back to those places and they did not come back. Recovery programs and assistance may contribute to all of that. It’s a number of factors.

RM: Another one for the frontline workers seems to have been the conditions that they were returning to and the things that were being asked to do that made their job a bit more stressful.

MD: I think it’s gotten better since then, but early on, second wave and third wave, it made it very difficult for someone that’s having to do two or three jobs by themselves and having to deal with difficult patrons. A lot of those people, when they were let go when the restaurants were closed, spent time reflecting and decided not to go back.

RM: That seems to be reflected in the type of work you’re doing at the Job Resource Centre when it comes to staff retraining.

MD: We see people now more than ever that come and see a career counsellor who were working frontline in restaurants and are now taking the time to switch careers.

RM: It looks like the average wage in the Bow Valley hasn’t really budged too much in the last little while.

MD: It has not. Over the last five years it went from $12 to $15. It’s typical for employers to pay entry level workers other than servers $16 or $17 an hour. What we’ve seen is it might’ve gone up a dollar or two.

RM: It’s about $19.11 per hour on average right now?

MD: That’s right.

RM: I’m looking at some of the housing rental rates. That seems to be an area, generally speaking with a couple of exceptions, that hasn’t really budged that much either.

MD: What has been interested during this period has been that employers usually offer a room for two people. Because of COVID-19 they’ve gone to one person per room, but did not charge double.

RM: What do you see in the future, in the next half year, for the labour market in town?

MD: We understand that the Australian border has reopened and they will issue 2000 to 3000 work permits. I don’t know how soon we’ll see them, but I think they will help with the second recruitment effort that ski resorts put in. Usually in January they have to recruit again, so hopefully we will see some of that traffic, and also from Quebec and Ontario.

RM: I was speaking with someone who works for a local ski resort. They were talking about some of the potential challenges they’re going to have for this winter season with some of the factors that we’ve already discussed and the fact that they need to have hundreds of people working for their resorts.

MD: Over the last month the ski resorts have held hiring fairs in many forms, and what would be a day where you would be attracting maybe 40 people for interviews, that was down to like five to eight. This summer, if you asked me how bad the staff shortage was, it was the one job seeker for five job openings.

RM: What’s the normal rate?

MD: We would be, in the summer, four for five normally.

RM: Are there still a number of jobs available and posted on the Job Resource Centre website?

MD: I would guess around 200, and for this time of year that’s quite a bit.

Filed under: Banff, Canmore