Career Options
Alberta recruiters target Ontario's industrial heartlandJobs still aplentyThe head of a Calgary recruiting firm -- in southwestern Ontario yesterday holding a job fair -- said Ontario could lose thousands of workers and they wouldn't be missed. |
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 [ 2007-03-17 ] |
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Denise Jorgensen of Calgary's EMS services talks to Selina Cameron and Virginia Clarke, two Fanshawe College students, about job opportunities in Calgary. A group of Alberta-based construction companies and emergency services came to London yesterday for a job fair in order to recruit workers for the booming Alberta economy. (Mike Hensen, Sun Media)
The head of a Calgary recruiting firm -- in southwestern Ontario yesterday holding a job fair -- said Ontario could lose thousands of workers and they wouldn't be missed.
"Last year 30,000 people migrated from Ontario to Alberta. Ontario has 7 million people in the labour force. You're looking at a gradual migration, but it's going to be such a low percentage, Ontario would never feel the impact," said Ray Edwardson, the president of Workwest.
His company is keying in on Ontario to find sorely needed labour for Alberta because of the glut of employees here. His take on the situation was that the 140,000 Alberta companies that need workers are helping out Ontarians.
"I look at it this way. We're all Canadians. There's 32 million people in this country and not everybody is enjoying the advantages that others have in certain parts of the country and we need to look after each other," he said.
"You've got such a compressed population base here that you need to bring some folks out and alleviate some of the congestion and challenges."
Edwardson said Workwest will not be holding career caravans in any of the other provinces, but they are hoping to seek employees in Windsor and Toronto, although those plans are tentative.
HOUSE MARKET IS HOT
"There's a lot of great people in Ontario," he said at the London job fair.
The average salary in Calgary is at about $60,000 and a household income is more than $100,000. That's 30% to 40% higher than Ontario, Edwardson said.
He said part of the job fair process is also to educate people about what living in Calgary would be like and to clear up some "misnomers."
He said the cost of living is not as high as one might expect and while the housing market is hot, buying a house in Calgary would cost less than in Toronto.
Leslie Bigelow, a staff development officer with Calgary's Emergency Medical Services, who was at the job fair yesterday along with 10 other organizations, said he has found that costs in Calgary are equal to or less than those in Ontario.
"We don't have PST," he said, as an example.
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