Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Boom times, or blips?


While we have no doubt that the Fairview Container Port is going to change the landscape and the economy of Prince Rupert, we had to chuckle at the front page of the Daily News on Monday.

“Staff a hot commodity as city booms” declared the headline of a story about the misfortune of the local RONA store and its staffing problems this week.

What followed was an examination of the departure of a number of key staff members (three in one day apparently) all off to make fame and fortune in other industries rather than building supplies. From that bit of employment movement at a building supplies store, we are to believe that the boom times are now officially declared as on.

A situation which of course would be nice and welcome, if only some numerical evidence might back it up! While the longshoremen’s union apparently prepares to plunder the local businessman/woman, of his or her most valued employees, you would think that the job boards must be chock a block full of opportunity! But, a quick check today at the Service Canada on line job opportunities data base, tells a slightly different story it would seem.

With a crest of high paying opportunities seemingly slipping through our fingers here, we logged on this afternoon at 2:30, to see what great jobs we may have missed out on in just a few short weeks. Service Canada featured 4 (that’s one, two, three and four!) job opportunities available in our reporting district of the Northwest, one of which was actually over on the Charlottes.

For fun we then decided to see how the rest of the province was doing, as well as that iconic definition of boom times, Alberta.

It’s a bit overwhelming to count the number of jobs being offered on those boards compared to our “booming times” locally on the job boards. Remember these are just the jobs officially listed by Service Canada and does not count other sources such as newspapers, third party job boards or the ever popular old boys/girls network (apparently still the most popular way of finding work in Rupert by the way).

We avoided the large urban areas like Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton and instead checked out the mid to small size communities across the two provinces. In the space of ten minutes, we had logged on to the Service Canada sites across both Alberta and BC. The numbers seemed to jump off the screen, multiplying rapidly from the local count of 4.

In the Peace country, 110 jobs listed, 48 of them in Fort St. John, Prince George had 100 listed, the Cariboo, which includes Quesnel, Williams Lake and 100 Mile House had 68 opportunities combined. The Kootenay’s had 88 opportunities to surf through, while in the Thompson region, Kamloops had 267 jobs listed. The Okanagan seems to be a hot place to look, as Kelowna had 345 opportunities listed, Penticton 112 and Vernon with 96 for a total of over 568 jobs where the sun reportedly shines every day.

And while all of that is pretty impressive, it seems to pale in comparison to what is still going on across the Rockies.

Taking the U Haul into Grande Prairie would find you searching over 450 job possibilities, while Fort McMurray listed some 297 opportunities. Medicine Hat is seeking out 196 would be workers, Lethbridge has jobs for 211. If the mountains are your thing, Banff had 305 listings while Jasper to Hinton featured 126 opportunities. Of the small to middle sized cities of Alberta, Red Deer is the employment leader. These would appear to be rather hectic days in central Alberta, with 585 jobs listed.

So while we are hopeful for an economic turn around in the Northwest, compared to our massive total of 4, we seem to be a few thousand jobs below the towns and cities that might want to use the old boom time’s moniker.

Until we are listing page after page of job opportunities, perhaps we could go easy on the breathless mantra that we’re living in a boom town. The statistical evidence isn’t quite living up to the bombast, just yet!

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