Jobs aren’t what they used to be – or where they used to be

If you had to pick one word that is pivotal in every political campaign, there’s no contest: it’s “jobs.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper can’t open his mouth without saying “jobs, growth, prosperity.” Christy Clark won her stunning election victory chanting “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Thousands of soft NDP voters scrambled to the BC Liberals out of fear of losing their jobs, or losing their children’s jobs, or losing a chance at a better job in the future. And yet the new job market – even if all the new projects on Premier Clark’s long wish list came true – offers far fewer opportunities to British Columbians than it did in the past. There are three reasons for this, none of which was even mentioned in the provincial election campaign, none of which is easy to fix.

The first – and most easily fixed – is the “outsourcing” of new jobs to temporary foreign workers. This undermining of the welfare of Canadians by companies desperate for a low wage advantage has been exposed in recent months. The federal government is finally taking steps to address it. Their most notable step is eliminating the option to pay temporary foreign workers 15% less than Canadian residents. Even so, as recent CBC stories have revealed, many businesses need only pretend they looked for adequately skilled Canadian workers to get federal approval to bring in foreign workers.

B.C. is now “home” to almost a quarter of Canada’s 338,000 temporary foreign workers. We now have more than twice as many temporary foreign workers in B.C. as permanent immigrants. Seven years ago, permanent immigrants outnumbered temporary foreign workers.

All the new job creation the premier can muster over the next four years will do nothing for working families if the jobs go to temporary foreign workers with no special skills. Hardest hit will be newly landed immigrants – whose unemployment rate already tops 11%.

But stemming the influx of temporary foreign workers does nothing to stop the outsourcing of B.C. jobs to workers in other countries who don’t ever have to move here. The recent debacle at RBC, where offshore workers were brought into Canadian offices to learn their new jobs from the people they would be displacing, was merely a disturbing illustration of a process that goes on every day unnoticed.

Any job that involves working exclusively on a screen or that can be done anywhere there’s an Internet hookup is vulnerable to being exported overseas.

We’ve seen it for years with call centres and data processing. Now it’s extending to legal work, software engineering, film post-production, even training doctors. Thousands of jobs at universities, including construction jobs for new lecture halls that are no longer necessary, are set to disappear. Now that students can stay out of the classroom and get knowledge transfer online, free, from the greatest teachers in the world, why should they keep supporting jobs for local lecturers?

The third giant job-sucking sound comes from the technological advances that are wiping out jobs as relentlessly as ATMs vaporized thousands of bank-teller positions.

Think of the bookstore clerks, video store employees and newspaper distributors whose jobs are going, going, gone.

Investment in the skills and information/communication/technology infrastructure that makes us competitive in knowledge-based industries is our best bet to create lasting jobs for people who actually live in B.C. Without retraining British Columbians to compete with temporary foreign workers, and without facing the competitive pressures of all these new technologies head-on, new pipeline jobs aren’t going to make much of a difference for the vast majority of families in B.C. •