What about all the unemployed in BC and the North, how about the company’s putting money into them for training to fill the jobs, time they invested in the people and not just exporting everything we have.

Rather than properly fund the colleges lets just import what we need.

I agree, get these kids off the streets and into a job training program. We force kids to stay in school and create problems for themselves and their teachers. Take them out and put them to work learning a trade.

Forget investing in our citizens… Bell just wants to import workers and leave ours without jobs???!!!!

Educate, train, and create benefits for Canadians.

Another BC Liberal idiot plan

How much of the money made by these workers leaves the country? How does that affect Canada’s bottom line?

What about parachute workers for example up in Ft. Nelson. Workers fly in from other areas of the province, work their rotation then fly home spending little if any money in BC while the rest of us pay taxes here. Do the home provinces of these workers get the benifit of the taxes that should be collected in BC?

“Bell says we know given the forecast that over the next decade there will be over one million job openings due to our aging workforce and economic growth, we will not be able to meet our labour-market demands without new skilled immigrants.”

Computer glitch … sorry ….

I do not understand why he and the government keep giving out this totally meaningless number that sounds absolutely humunguous.

It is not as if there is not some level of a replacement population of younger people going through training, otherwise normal migration from other parts of the country as well as normal immigration based on past practice.

Please, please, please use the projected shortfall number!!! and give it to us in your modelled projections for 2012, 13, 14, etc. and prject it out past 10 years to show us how long that is expected to continue ……

The show us what the alternatives are and the benefits of each.

We are NOT stupid!!!!

Ship raw logs out of BC – screw the mill workers. Bring in foreign workers – screw the young kids. Leave the province with $100 of millions in hidden debt – screw the future generations. But whatever you do – don’t vote NDP!!!

“New regulations will weed out employers who intend to break the rules.”
Translation:
More red tape in the form of paperwork for the employers who don’t intend to break the rules.
Pat Bell = consummate politician; def:
‘one who is adept at playing both ends against the middle’
Says whatever will best preserve future votes from all quarters, and what pleases the leader, both of which are survival instincts for those who wish to be re-elected.
Re-election, after all, is THE end game.
metalman.

In the Vancouver sun today big ad from Australia mining and pipeline company having job fair in Van for skilled workers seems everyone has the same problem can’t manage to train their own like us and try to steal from each other. lets see northern bc, Fort Mac Australia wake up BC.

Where are the tax breaks and soft landings for guys like me? I helped my own family for 15 years foregoing normal things like Grad ceremonies and birthdays. I wasted the better part of my working life propping up a failed enterprise and now I’m left standing around like a cartoon character with his pockets turned out. Where is the help for guys like me?

If there is going to be such a shortage of workers, how can anyone say we need things like the Enbridge pipeline for the jobs. Or things like the Prosperity mine which the proponents say we need for the jobs.

All we hear is jobs, jobs, jobs. How about slowing things down so that we have sufficient people to do the work, yet leave something in the ground for future generations.

A lot of the usual bellyaching going on.

So what’s our BC unemployment rate? 7%? How many of that 7% are employable, educated, and trainable? Maybe half at most?

With the impending wave of retirements, there’s no way we can meet the labour shortfall with BC residents exclusively. The work still needs to get done. So what’s the solution? Conjure people out of thin air?

You hit the nail on the head, JohnnyBelt!

“How many are employable, educated, and trainable?”

That’s a great place to start, JohnnyBelt!Perhaps instead of gutting public education for the last eleven years we could have invested in it to meet the needs of business going forward.

Having an education system that is cheap and inexpensive to run, that does not care about producing a product results in exactly what you have said, JohnnyBelt. That exact reality results in an education system that produces, unemployable, uneducated, and untrainable products.

The good thing is tho, it can be run cheap, you get what you pay for.

Thank you JohnnyBelt! I agree that any capable person who wants to work is already working! The rest are unwilling to go where the work is. I just attended a job fair that had 22 companies from all around the region. Their combined starting wage was in the 80-90,000 range and only a handful of people showed up to inquire about a career with them. This happens on a regular basis. We will import workers because there is no other choice! Entitlement comes with a cost,just ask all the new employees that will be arriving!

Boy you would think that our university, college and schools are being run into the ground.
I think mostly the reason why there is a need to import skilled workers is a misallocation of capital in the system. Encouraging all children to attend a 4 year degree is the basis of our education system. But only 20 percent ever end of there. The other 80 percent are failed in some manner.
Without this resource development who is going to pay for all of our pensions, teachers wages, and health care? Wake up folks, we are all in this together, and every smart person in this town is saying the same thing. We just can’t get people who are good at what they do. You can hire someone who doesn’t want to work and pay them well to do it, but in the end all that means is that the productive members of society have even more weight to pull. Remember the horse from the animal farm? Would the farm have suffered if another horse was brought it…

This is simply a matter of applying the law of supply and demand to keep a lid on labour expenses

7% is actually near zero. Fact is if you are not working right now you either don’t want to or you are unemployable. Yes that unfortunately goes out to displaced mill workers too. If you are a late 50’s millworker that has had a union job for 30 years then good for you on the living you have made so far but do not expect to walk into something with the same wages. The gap lies in “there are no jobs” and “there are no jobs that pay what I was making”

asphalt! You have it backwards! Labour has all the strength to get the wages and benefits they want right now! Of course that is based on merit, not seniority!

I only see politicians talking and throwing out numbers. Where’s the beef? What are these 1,000,000 jobs? Flipping burgers? With every new technology, less people are employed. How many fewer will be needed to do the same job today, ten years from now? This is all about selling Canada to china. You’ll see.

asphalt! You have it backwards! Labour has all the strength to get the wages and benefits they want right now! Of course that is based on merit, not seniority!

A lot of these jobs are replacing people leaving the workforce, on top of new jobs! I don’t particularly like selling our resource to China or the U.S. for that matter,but Canadians don’t like buying expensive Canadian made goods. Therefore we send our resource abroad and import them back so we can have cheap goods. If we want to change this cycle ,we have to be prepared to make a substantial change to our way of life.

we will not be able to meet our labour-market demands without new skilled immigrants.

11 God forsaken years this Liberal Government has been giving it’s citizen’s THE SHAFT!
This Government needs to tell these business buddies of theirs to take all that Government tax money that got given to them on silver platters, to turn around and TRAIN the next up and coming employee even if it means that the company comes up with half the training fee’s!

Your letting in 10’s of thousands of people and our hospitals can’t even handle the capacity it’s got! These Liberals don’t want to pay the teachers nor build anymore schools but want to bombard an already crumbling system. Liberal thieves whom can’t think past their own noses! Not to mention 10 thousand skilled workers also comes 30 thousand family members who WON”T speak English and that’s just being modest…. It’ll cost our already taxed to death system more than just train these kids coming out of school. Give them a jump of tax free on anything that has to do with an education and maybe some parents could afford to send their kids to college! You Liberals TAKE and never give back!

Well said hammy!
And Pat Bell talks out of both sides of his
B.C.Liberal defending face.
He too has an appointment at the ballot box.

planning seems to be only a word as there seems to be very little done. people doing the planning do not act to solve situations or problems they react and imo we get crap.

Hammy! We are at full employment so you will have to accept the inevitable!If you can get some of the people on entitlement to go to work, I would be your favourite fan! Good Luck with that!

My point of view on this is a bit different than these other ones.
1. So many of our people are not willing to go where the work is. So they remain unemployed, but home. The good paying jobs in P.G. are diminishing. Wasn’t there just recently a report that it would get worse, soon? 150 jobs were lost at Lakeland this week.
2. Those employers looking to hire in P.G. are not willing to compete with the wages in the out of town oil and gas industry. My husband has been offered jobs here, good jobs, making $40-50,000.00 a year less. If you aren’t willing to pay, you will not get the skilled people you are looking for.
3. Those “parachute jobs” in Ft. Nelson? They are paying my mortgage, truck and R.V. payments. All here in P.G.. They buy every dime we spend here. They pay our city taxes, provincial payroll taxes, federal payroll taxes, and PST, HST, GST, MSP, etc. etc.
4. Funding for trades? My Tradesman was educated here. There wasn’t much of a wait. 6 months or so. The trades courses were shockingly inexpensive. The textbooks cost way more than the courses, and E.I. paid benefits while work was missed to go to school. After the Pr-apprenticeship course, he signed up for his next 3 years, and every single year, someone from CNC would call to see if he would be able to take his courses earlier than anticipated. So in my life, I don’t see the problem with the amount of seats, or the funding. YMMV.
The reality is that there are jobs going unfilled, because people won’t sacrifice to make a living. Someone told them, at some point, that they should be able to sleep in their own beds every night, have a completely free education with no wait at all, and be paid super well for all that. That is not realistic, IMO.

So what you are saying News2me, is that business’ in Prince George want cheap skilled labour? These business’ then went to their MLA in Pat Bell and he is now going to provide that for them? You, News2me, are not willing to work for nothing, so therefore are willing to parachute to where business is willing to pay for that old free enrterprize concept of supply and demand. You would think a so called free enterprize government in the BC Liberals would understand that just letting free enterprize work itself out, these skilled labour problems would just work out in the free market.

Goodbye Bell, Bond and the rest of the Campbell/Clark gang. You’re all toast in the next election. You’ve pushed the people too far.

Well said Hammy!

Harpers plan to get those collecting welfare and unemployment benefits doing the jobs normally done by foreign workers is fantastic!

I agree, Taxed Out! that free enterprise should work itself out. I think that allowing foreign workers to work here is fine, if there are jobs here for them, that are remaining unfilled. However, those foreign workers may not want to work here, in P.G., if they too can make significantly more in the the oil and gas industry. As long as they are not going to be at home, they will want to make as much as possible, or be in a nice place. P.G. offers neither.
Also, to be clear, I work in P.G., my Husband works elsewhere. ;) I like P.G., or we wouldn’t be here.

Hmmm, guess I will be looking into the two coal mines that the Chinese want to put in around the Chetwynd area and check to see if the government is allowing them to mine the area in the near future… The Liberal government we have, if I am not mistaken has been working with the Chinese government to bring in their own workers for these 2 mines. Maybe the paperwork is being OK’d sooner than later….

The government seems to be 10 years late in their predictions in regards to jobs required. Many of the jobs they are talking about were in their own stats 10 years ago. Ask yourself why Service Canada does not use their own information……sooner than later…..

Taxed Out: “Perhaps instead of gutting public education for the last eleven years we could have invested in it to meet the needs of business going forward.”

Thanks for that great line of rhetoric from the NDP playbook! However, if you look at enrollment figures in public schools over the last ten years, you would see a downward trend in almost all districts. Per student funding is actually up. We just don’t have enough students.

As someone said, we always seem to be late to the party in terms of reacting to the impending labour shortage. Like most emergencies, we’ll wait until it’s a crisis, and we’ll react at that time.

Lest we forget! Pat Bell routinely refused to pay his slaves at Wendy’s more than the $8.00 per hour minimum.

And they’re not all students! Some have families that they must support: you know, like food on the table, clothes on their backs.

I’d like to see him struggle to make a fair living for his family on such pitiful wages!

NB: “Lest we forget! Pat Bell routinely refused to pay his slaves at Wendy’s more than the $8.00 per hour minimum.

And they’re not all students! Some have families that they must support: you know, like food on the table, clothes on their backs.

I’d like to see him struggle to make a fair living for his family on such pitiful wages!”

Since when was minimum wage supposed to guarantee a fair living for someone and their family? If that were the case, minimum wage would be about $20.00 an hour. And hopefully you will enjoy that $15.00 Wendy’s hamburger next time you eat there.

Minimum wage is supposed to be temporary and entry-level. Hopefully to encourage people to get educated and strive for more. It’s not meant for lifetime employment. But I know that you socialist-types don’t see it this way.

Perhaps per student money has increased, JohnnyBelt, but it hasn’t trickled to the student. Of course funding would have to increase to pay for things like heat for schools, I know personally my father in-law plows snow in winter and his bid to plow has increased alot over the last few years. So I agree perhaps the per student funding has increased, only to keep up with fixed costs of running a bricks and mortar institution.

As for gutting of the education system, it is just that, the funding that goes to directly educate a child has not kept pace. In fact it has been drastacly reduced, no Librarians, less special needs help, larger class sizes, no class composition requirements, all effecting the day to day environment directly effecting the learning process.

The result has been just as I stated above, an education system where the product is irrellevant.

hammy wrote:
“Your letting in 10’s of thousands of people and our hospitals can’t even handle the capacity it’s got! These Liberals don’t want to pay the teachers nor build anymore schools but want to bombard an already crumbling system.”

The problem that we have known about for around 30+ years is that the baby boom will eventually hit us with too many seniors if we do not keep on having babies or importing people from elsewhere. It happened in Europe before it happened here so they created the “guest worker” solution.

Solution could have been to have those workers put enough money into the system to use when they got older. But that was not enough because everything got more and more expensive, proportionately, and we wanted more and more toys while we could still enjoy them, and we ended up living even longer than our parents and grandparents did and paid more and more for the medical system to allow us to do it.

Could anyone have predicted that? Could anyone have predicted that we would be buying more and more cheap stuff from the Japanese, then the Koreans, then the Chinese, then the Vietnamese that we could not afford because some of us were paying a fortune to wage wars to protect cheap oil and be the policeman of the whole world while all we could make was armaments and the rest of the manufacturing prowess was gone.

Its called lack of planning, lack of foresight, lack of understanding the modern mindset of North Americans and old colonial imperial countries.

So now we are stuck.

Underpopulated with a lack of savings to maintain a lifestyle we are accustomed to. In other words, while we talked about sustainability we did not practice sustainability as a society. Luckily we escaped some of what I have written above because the USA took care of protecting us from one perceived, and sometimes actual, enemy after another.

So, rather than raising sufficient children of our own, and covering all the costs associated with the feeding, the education, the medical care, etc. we are going to end up saving those costs and get ourselves some more new citizens as we have done for generations to begin sharing this vast and underpopulated country of ours and living off their toil to maintain the people whose old age legacy was squandered away by one government after another, no matter what political stripe they came from.

So what is wrong with that picture? It is who we are and who we have been from the earliest days of French and English ancestors who crossed the oceans in sailing ships. Nothing will change in the short to mid term until this land will be overburdened with too many people and that will not likely happen for a long time.

We have been blessed.

You’re right BCRacer!
Pat Bell insults all canadian workers and their families who fight to make a decnt living!
Such arrogance!
And this while he owns a Wendy’s franchise, as well as sucking deeply at the public tax trough as an elected “government” representative?
Who is he really representing?
B.C. taxpayers or foreign workers?
Is this the attitude of all B.C.Liberals.or just Pat Bell?
Bring in more foreign workers to help keep wages low in B.C.?
Would this be part of the B.C.Liberals “Net Zero” policy?
See you at the ballot box ASAP Pat Bell…I can assure you, I will not be dropping by Wendy’s any time soon!

So tell me Andyfreeze, do you actually think that every single individual has the interest, the ability, and the stick-to-it-ness to make it through to high school graduation and sufficient knowledge of fundamental physics, chemistry and math to make a top notch tradesperson whose trade will be progressing so fast that they will have to retrain within the first decade of work and at least every decade after that?

Why is it that you and others think that is likely? History has shown that is a fallacy. It takes more than just seniority these days to earn $25, then $30, then $35 and so on per hour.

And I am not even talking about the lack of bodies to put into the system. It is not just numbers. It is a whole spectrum of aptitudes and mindsets that people have to bring to the education process with them.

Just as there are good and poor teachers, there are good and poor students. Society now takes care of those who cannot keep up in the workplace to some extent. In other countries they do so more than in Canada.

BUT in order to be able to afford to do that, we need highly skilled workers who can compete with highly skilled workers in countries that are better off than we are.

There are several people on here who really do not look at the reality of the situation. THAT is the problem we are facing more and more and you provide no realistic solution.

Our youth need to be exposed to opportunities to these skills at an earlier age. Thank God for the trades program my son had the opportunity to belong to as he graduated not only with his grade 12 but with a welding C ticket and a full time well paying job here in PG. the company allowed him to continue his schooling and he completed his B ticket. If it wasn’t for this partnership with the highschools and CNC, I honestly don’t know where he would be today as his interest in school was lost by grade 10. Put money back into the school system and start offering more of the trades to our youth at a younger age. Give them something they can strive for and be proud of.

gus: “There are several people on here who really do not look at the reality of the situation. THAT is the problem we are facing more and more and you provide no realistic solution.”

Exactly.

While some of you are boycotting Wendys, you might as well boycott all the other fast food restaurants. Most of them pay minimum wage as well.

Maybe if enough people boycott, we can shut those restaurants down and put a bunch of people out of work… uh… wait a minute…

Ditto JB! What you said.

I think there is a point being missed here.
Let’s try looking at it another way…
Simply put,the government believes that lower wages make Canada better able to compete on the world market.
They believe that the higher wages paid in Canada make our manufacturing costs too high in general.
Their solution is to have a lot more workers than there are jobs,thus keeping wages lower.
Their corporate friends like that a lot.
That is the point behind more foreign workers…flood the market place.
That is the only reason,and Pat Bell knows it.
Let’s face it,if employers have a line up at the door for whatever job/s they to fill,are they going to pay a higher wage or a lower wage?
No competition for skilled workers between employers means a lower wage will indeed be paid.
If you don’t want to work for a poorer wage,someone else will…go to the back of the line!
An employer cares about profits,…not people.
Profits are good…no profits,no jobs,but will this increase employment?
Sometimes,but not always.
Our government/s hand out tax concessions to companies for what?
To hire more people or to help them be more competative?
That doesn’t work either and tax concessions should be based on job creation.
Create jobs, get a tax break…create no jobs,less in tax breaks.
We are constantly being berated by the government/s for wanting more money,but it is that same government that does nothing to control the rapidly rising costs of everyday living.
They keep taking more and more out of the pockets of workers and families.
(We may have noticed that here in B.C.)
As an example of that,everytime the B.C.Liberals fart,it costs us more money in user fees etc.etc.
It never ends,but damn it!…don’t you dare ask for more money!
How thoughtless of us!
“There are several people who do not look at the reality of the situation”.
And thank god for that,we need more of them, as opposed to those who simply accept the governments reasoning as gospel.
If that foreign worker filling up the market place will do a certain job for less money,who do we think will get that job?
If someone is willing to do a job for 12 bucks that used to pay 16…12 bucks will indeed become the new wage for that job.
And that IS the reality of the situation.
Is there a solution?
Sure there is.
Reduce user fees,taxes,and general costs of living and people will take less in wages.
Unfortunately,that is not going to happen.
People will always want more because they need more to off-set what that hand in the pocket keeps taking.
It is going to bet a lot worse before it ever gets better.
As it stands now,those that make the most do the least…politicians and their lackies and they are the ones telling us we need to take less.
What is wrong with that picture?

In a free enterprise system like we use to have in this country we would be properly funding education so that every young person in BC has equal opportunity to a higher education based on merit. Supply and demand would then even itself out based on the value one gets from an education. This would also assist enterprises in training their own.

To put all the risk on the students to go into deep debt on a hope and a prayer they will make enough to pay off the debt (education for the elites), and then under cut the students with foreign workers that will not have the same rights as a Canadian worker and vulnerabilities that with keep wage rates down.. this does nothing but serve the interests of bankers that want to harvest our province of all its resources without paying into its future.

Andyfreeze wrote.

“I think there is a point being missed here.
Let’s try looking at it another way…
Simply put,the government believes that lower wages make Canada better able to compete on the world market.
They believe that the higher wages paid in Canada make our manufacturing costs too high in general.
Their solution is to have a lot more workers than there are jobs,thus keeping wages lower.
Their corporate friends like that a lot.
That is the point behind more foreign workers…flood the market place.”

Not sure wher you get that spin from.

Canada is not the only place in the world that has these probelms or has had the problems.

For instance, a classic example were some pf the European countries after the second world war. Sevral countries had lost a lot of people due to the war. They either died or were maimed to the point of not being able to work high demand physical jobs such as construction. There was a high demand on housing in those regions where major cities were bombed out up to 50, 60, 70% in places.New families were forming to add to the demand.

Solution? Forei

computer glitch ….

Foreign workers was not a solution. The started to invent various concrete panelized systems buildings for multi story apartments. The problem was not prices, the problem was lack of workers resulting in a demand that could not be met. They had quotas for how many rooms a family was allowed to have. My granfather had a maonor house with over 20 rooms. It was taken away for refugees. He was given some money but a pittance of what he had put into it to refurbish a run-down place.

Money is not the problem. workers are the problem.

Just imagine what the extent of the problem would be if we had not increased productivity over time. Even with that, we are running into lack of a capable workforce problem. We weill have to fight some of that with finding more efficient production processes. It is a multi-pronged approach that will be required.

“In a free enterprise system like we use to have in this country we would be properly funding education so that every young person in BC has equal opportunity to a higher education based on merit.”

Since when does a free enterprise system fund education? Left leaning governments and socialist systems fund education to the full cost or very close to the full cost.

Look at the fight going on right now in Quebec.

I do not usually agree with David Frum, but the linked article which was written in response to the riots and one which sides with the rioters is an excellent summary of the economic reality in Canada and the USA over the last 50 years.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/04/28/david-frum-on-the-quebec-student-riots-grandpas-free-ride

“The people born before 1960 came of age in a society where the proceeds of economic growth were broadly shared. If the country got richer, everybody in the country got richer.

“But in today’s more globalized economy, the proceeds of growth are shared less broadly. The United States is an extreme case: By one estimate, in the year 2010, 93% of the benefits of economic growth were captured by the top 1% of the population. But similar trends can be seen in every advanced democracy, including Canada.”

Is that your particular solution, gus?
If someones opinion is different than yours,it must be “spin”?
We don’t live in post-war Europe,we live in Canada, and that is where our focus should be.
And if Canada is not the only place in the world that has these problems,could the problem be with solutions that our politicians seem to think they have?
These are troubled times, and it is pretty obvious the usual politically driven solutions we have been bombarded with for so long, are simply not working anymore.
If in fact they ever did.
That is after all,how we got here.
Maybe it is time for a new approach,or would that be more spin?

Look at your posts Andyfreeze ….

“Simply put,the government believes that lower wages make Canada better able to compete on the world market.”

It is a classic putting of words into someone’s mouth. Where did they say that? Until you show me where they said that, I have to assume that it is you who suggested they said that.

You are simply taking a supply and demand theory and applying it in the simplest way.

So you think we have enough people to run our economy which needs to support a higher percentage of people not working?

You still have not come up with your solution.

I have no solution. I’m not the government. I am bringing forth the concept that there are countries who have managed either some time ago, recently, or right now to address a similar problem relatively well.

It is rare that a single solution will solve a major problem. It is even too risky to trust one solution.

1. Look at foreign workers for short term employment such as seasonal farm workers.

2. look at immigrants in targeted industries for long term labour – could be high skilled as well as low skilled.

3. look at upping added value levels in manufacturing and technical/professional services – the salary in those areas is not as wide, thus has less effect in competitive situations.
—————————–

“They believe that the higher wages paid in Canada make our manufacturing costs too high in general.”

Do they? or is it you that thinks that?

“Their solution is to have a lot more workers than there are jobs,thus keeping wages lower.”

Why on earth would a rational person bring more people into this country to flood the market and have people who are underemployed and unhappy, and underpaid and a burden on society? You really do not have any faith in anyone other than yourself, do you?