Canada is reopening, and yet some sectors and businesses are struggling to find workers. Is the solution as simple as increasing our immigration to bring in more workers to fill the gaps?
No, says The Hub’s editor-at-large Sean Speer. He joins the Crisis Management podcast this week with Yahoo Finance Canada’s Jeff Lagerquist to discuss the issue and how Canada can address this overall imbalance.
While the pandemic has understandably drawn so much attention to the short term problem of COVID-induced unemployment, this was the consequence of some extraordinary circumstances, says Speer. This risks detracting from the larger issue at hand:
“The biggest impediment facing long term economic growth isn’t too much labour, it isn’t unemployment issues, it is precisely the opposite. It’s that, primarily because of demographic reasons, we are going to have more jobs than people.”
We need to be maximizing the human capital of all Canadians, and while immigration can be a tool in our kit, it is not our only one. Especially, he argues, if focusing on immigration precludes discussion on what else we need to be doing to address the longer term challenges facing Canada and its economy.
These include: spending on technology to lessen the need for human labour, increased skills training for those who are dislocated from one job and need to find another, and, most importantly, helping underrepresented groups participate in our economy at much higher rates.
Speer and Lagerquist also discuss what if anything we can learn from other countries facing similar labour shortages, how Canada can better engage the Indigenous population to ensure they are also full participants in our economy, and the reasons why these particular challenges may be more acute and pressing here in Canada.
