It’s a job seekers market in Jasper this summer.
There are help wanted signs pinned up in every second window downtown and the job board at Jasper’s Career and Employment Centre is overflowing with housekeeping and serving positions.
“We’re sitting at a crossroads of a lot of the labour issues, everything from changes to the temporary foreign workers program to some rumour saying that Jasper’s not hiring university students,” said Pattie Pavlov, general manager of the Jasper Park Chamber of Commerce. “I don’t know where the rumour started, but it’s an unfortunate one. I have had some of our business owners say to me that they usually get—without any prompting, with no advertising—people walking in with their resume to get that second job ... and this year many of them have received absolutely zilch.”
Although it feels particularly tight in Jasper right now, it’s not just here that’s feeling the crunch.
A recent report completed for the University of Alberta shows labour shortages across the province, especially in health care, retail, hotel and food services. In that report, titled An Examination of Alberta Labour Markets, Jasper, Banff and Edmonton show the greatest risk of labour shortages, although their numbers are just slightly higher than the rest of the province.
“What we found generally is that lower skill and lower paying occupations end up having relatively larger shortages because when the economy improves the people who are working in those sectors get attracted up to higher paying jobs,” said Darryl Howery, an economist who worked on the report.
That’s exactly what we’re seeing in Jasper, said Ginette Marcoux-Frigon, executive director of the Jasper Adult Learning Centre. The people who are visiting the centre to look at the job board or to request assistance with their resume are either working on moving up to new, higher paying positions or they’re looking for a second job to go alongside their full-time position.
“There’s not a lot of brand new job seekers walking into town looking for work,” she said, noting that that’s unusual for Jasper.
Adding to this year’s labour shortage in town is that Jasper has had extra visitors because of the flooding in southern Alberta last month.
“It’s been Jasper’s boom,” said Pavlov. “This is reminiscent of days gone by and it’s wonderful to see. But then again what’s making it somewhat hairy, for lack of a better term, is that we’re aware there aren’t as many people here looking for work or as many people as there could be working.”
And things are only going to get worse as the students start heading back to school this month, she said.
“It’s going to get far more critical in the next few weeks. It’s going to be a very busy time. We’re thrilled to have people rediscovering Jasper, but we want to be able to meet everybody’s needs and make sure we’re making their vacation memorable.”
Judging by the latest numbers released by the Canadian Tourism Human Resource Council of Canada, this isn’t a temporary problem. In Alberta alone, the council is forecasting a shortfall of 24,562 tourism sector jobs by 2030.
“As a community we have to be looking at this,” said Marcoux-Frigon. “This isn’t sustainable. If we were bad this year and we were bad last year, imagine what we’re going to be like in two or three years.”
One solution, she said, is to develop a recruitment strategy for the entire community. Another is to get into schools to talk to students about jobs in the tourism sector.
“We haven’t done a good job, tourism as a whole hasn’t done a good job, of marketing this exciting field. When I look at the career days that come to Jasper each fall, there isn’t one university or college out there marketing tourism programs and yet we’re in the heart of tourism.”
Nicole Veerman
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