The moratorium on the food service industry’s access to temporary foreign workers is already impacting Jasper. However, that impact has the potential to increase significantly if the federal government can’t come to a quick resolution.
Ever since Minister of Employment and Social Development Jason Kenney announced the moratorium on April 24, many Jasper businesses have been scrambling to figure out how they will staff their restaurants and cafés.
Pattie Pavlov is the general manager of the Jasper Park Chamber of Commerce. After talking with the chamber’s membership last week she is convinced some will suffer tangibly in the moratorium’s wake.
“We definitely have issues: we have businesses that have been affected by the moratorium without a doubt,” she said. “They are literally scrambling as the season unfolds.”
In a survey of more than 70 of the chamber’s 170 members, Pavlov and her colleagues discovered about two-dozen foreign workers have already been directly affected. Pavlov pointed out that since only one-quarter of the members surveyed are in the food service industry, that number is more significant than it might seem at first glance.
And considering the size of many of those food service businesses—small operations with only a handful of employees—one or two workers on the fritz can hit hard. Pavlov said that while the moratorium isn’t affecting every business in Jasper, the ones feeling its effects are feeling them significantly.
She said some members of the chamber are already predicting their quality of service will go down and that they will have to shorten their business hours because of worker shortages.
With 300 open positions among just the 72 businesses surveyed, it doesn’t appear those shortages will end soon.
And while businesses are already suffering the consequences of Kenney’s decision, Pavlov is worried the impacts will last long after the issue is resolved.
“If this summer [tanks] because we do not have enough people to fill the jobs we have available, how does that effect the quality of service—how does that effect the level of service?” she asked.
“Everybody’s working so hard to really put Jasper on the map. When people get here we want to be able to deliver on that destination marketing promise. And if we can’t, what happens when they leave here? Will they ever come back again? Maybe not. Will they say some unfavourable things about Jasper? Possibly. There’s a long-term ramification here.”
Pavlov said if that happens the “ripple effect” will extend to all of Jasper, not just those businesses directly dealing with tourism, because so much in Jasper depends so strongly on its image. And the longer the ban stays in place, the more temporary foreign workers will feel its effects.
Mayor Richard Ireland agrees with Pavlov. In an interview May 9 he said the town is “looking at community-wide problems based on collective punishment.
“While the municipality recognizes that there may be cases of non-compliance—and there could be cases in our community—we think the approach ought to be to capture those that are offending and punish them. But this broad sweep where everybody is punished, including the innocent, just does not seem like the right approach.”
Ireland believes part of the problem is that Jasper is unique from the rest of the country in its reliance on temporary foreign workers. Most of Canada is fed up with the program and its flaws, and welcomes the review. However, because they aren’t scrambling for workers like Jasper, they may not see it from our town’s perspective.
Pavlov echoed Ireland, saying that her experience over the past week has led her to believe Kenney made a rash decision—based on the actions of a few restaurant owners—without properly considering the consequences.
“Are you going to close all the roads because somebody speeds?” she asked.
Ireland said last week he met with the mayor of Banff, who carried a “unified message” from her town, Jasper and Canmore to Kenney’s parliamentary secretary.
Later this month, representatives of the municipal council will also attend a joint meeting of municipal councils in Edson to further crystalize the region-wide message: this ban hurts tourism in the Rocky Mountain region, and in turn the rest of the province.
“We view the issue somewhat differently then it appears to be viewed across the country,” said Ireland. “But in the meantime the specific needs of our community get overlooked—and that is the problem with the broad stroke approach the government has taken.”
Trevor Nichols
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