The Green Star

A labour shortage occurs when the demand for labour exceeds the supply of labour, right? Well, apparently not in Alberta.

The Alberta Federation of Labour took a long, hard look at the Government of Alberta’s projections showing an astronomical labour shortage of 114,000 workers by 2021 and found them to be based on misleading methods [...] The result: even though the Alberta government’s projections show the supply of labour exceeding demand (a labour surplus, one would think) for every year through 2021, their strange method shows a labour shortage.

On July 16, Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney used Alberta’s “acute labour shortages” to justify an expansion of a Temporary Foreign Worker pilot program whereby employers won’t have to consider hiring Canadians in certain occupations first before turning to offshore labour [...]

Nevertheless, that fact hasn’t stopped anti-union interests in the province from using the government’s faulty labour shortage figures to call for radical changes to labour markets with the end goal of depressing wages in the oil sands.

Source