Manpower Forecasting for Megaprojects: The Case of Energy Projects in Western Canada

Over the past decade, both federal and provincial Canadian governments have become actively interested and involved in manpower forecasting exercises. Initiatives by both the Economic Council of Canada and the Federal Department of Employment and Immigration were in large measure a response to the peculiarities of Canadian demographics which have shown great variabilities in the flow and composition of immigration, an explosive and provincially differentiated growth pattern in education, leading, e.g., to a tripling in the age specific participation rates of post‐secondary students and unexpected rates of expansion of the female labour force in the seventies. Since historically Canada's international competitiveness and export performance have had a strong influence on her pattern of growth and economic development, employment and manpower policies had to similarly concern themselves with the general pattern of economic development. During the post‐war period, Canada's economic development has been characterised by two major resource booms in the fifties and seventies associated with the opening up of frontiers in the west and northern (Arctic) parts of the country and involving gas, fuels and minerals and a minor boom associated with the expansion of manufacturing in the sixties. As distinct from Canada's third phase of industrialisation in the sixties which hardly posed problems of manpower shortages on account of easy availability of immigrants from central and western Europe and the then existing labour market conditions in Canada, major natural resource developments, particularly those in the recent past have, for a number of reasons, caused serious manpower problems. In the sixties, shifts in industrial employment could easily be absorbed since they involved little in the way of geographical mobility (almost all Canadian manufacturing is located along the Canada/US border in Ontario and Quebec) and only required marginal human investments in terms of retraining and upgrading of skills, all of which were furthermore evenly stretched over a boom period of 4 to 6 years. Resource booms are very different in this respect. Typically, they have been large in size, amounting to billions of dollars which had to be spent unevenly over fairly short periods of time (2 to 4 years) in specific, mainly remote locations of the country. They, furthermore, often only create demand for a few distinct industries such as steel, transportation equipment and above all construction.