The Peace Bridge is illuminated over the Bow River in Calgary on Sept. 15.Todd Korol/Todd Korol/The Globe and Mail
Albertans may have developed a complicated relationship with Confederation, but there’s one aspect for which the province still shows a healthy appetite: labour mobility.
The Alberta government is in the midst of a marketing blitz to try to convince residents of two of Canada’s largest and most expensive cities – Toronto and Vancouver – to move to the province. The key selling points: affordable homes, shorter commutes, high-paying jobs, and a considerable dose of “honest, it’s nicer here than you think.”
Most conspicuously, Toronto’s Bloor-Yonge subway station – one of its busiest downtown transit hubs – has been plastered for the past week or so with bright baby-blue posters on walls, pillars and even staircases, making sure that commuters get the message in the midst of their daily trudge.
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But even without the in-your-face campaign, Alberta has been doing just fine attracting workers from other parts of the country. In the past four quarters, a net 22,000 Canadians have moved there from other parts of the country (94,000 have come to Alberta, while 72,000 have left). Two-thirds of those newcomers have arrived from Ontario and British Columbia.
The improvement in the fortunes of oil and gas markets – and the resulting upturn in the Alberta economy and hiring market – have been big factors. With the province scrambling to address serious shortages of the skilled labour necessary to sustain this growth, the Alberta government has latched on to an angle to try to attract some of the country’s best and brightest – especially young, highly educated urbanites.
That angle is housing.
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The Canadian Real Estate Association’s benchmark price of a single detached home in Calgary in September was $628,000. In Toronto, it was $1.6-million; in Vancouver, $1.9-million. The Alberta government wants the young, skilled workers shut out of the real estate markets in those other cities to know those numbers.
This is hardly the first time Alberta has counted on an influx of skilled workers to help keep its economic wheels turning. During the commodities boom of the tail end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, Alberta was a huge beneficiary of a key economic feature of Confederation: the (largely) free movement of labour across provincial boundaries.
In the 20 years from 1995 to 2015, about 1.5 million Canadians relocated to Alberta, while a little over a million left the province – a net inflow of nearly a half-million people. Alberta offered fellow Canadians high-paying jobs and opportunity; in exchange, Alberta got the influx of labour it sorely needed to sustain its rapid economic expansion. The province is looking for a similar win-win again.
While the marketing campaign might appear a bit heavy-handed, the selling points of a move to Alberta are compelling – even beyond that overwhelming home-price advantage.
Average wages in Alberta are the highest in the country. It has the youngest population among provinces, and one of the most highly educated. Albertans pay some of the lowest provincial income taxes in the country, and they don’t pay provincial sales tax, a savings of anywhere from 6 per cent to 10 per cent over other provinces.
Nevertheless, Alberta has an image problem among the young urban dwellers on whom its campaign is focused – an image that the current United Conservative Party government has more hindered than helped.
The province is often seen as a backward bastion of conservative values; an unrepentant champion of an environmentally unfriendly oil industry; as ill-suited, if not outright hostile, to the progressiveness and multiculturalism by which many people from downtown Toronto and Vancouver define themselves.
Like most stereotypes, “a lot of it is undeserved,” Calgary-based economist Todd Hirsch argued in an interview this week. Still, he said, “I think we’ve done a lot of things to damage our reputation.”
The UCP government has painted itself as a reluctant outsider in Confederation that sees confrontation as its best way to address its grievances – a message that has gained a great deal of traction among the province’s large base of conservative voters. Premier Jason Kenney derides the type of highly educated urban professionals who fill the Bloor-Yonge station every day as “Laurentian elites.”
The likely next premier of Alberta – Danielle Smith, the front-runner in the UCP leadership campaign that concludes Thursday evening – has promised that on “Day 1” of her premiership, she’ll declare the province’s sovereignty to overrule federal laws and policies.
That rhetoric is at odds with the reality that labour mobility is a proven economic advantage for Alberta as a partner in Confederation. The province couldn’t possibly draw the skilled workers it craves from foreign lands with anything close to the ease and speed that it can from Toronto or Vancouver, or anywhere else within Canada’s borders. It has tapped that national resource before, and it will do so in the future.
For now, the lure of cheap houses seems to be working for Alberta. But Mr. Hirsch argues that in the longer run, the province needs to tone down the confrontation and nurture a more welcoming brand if it wants to be a destination for young, skilled workers to put down roots.
“Especially young, bright, educated, mobile people, they will live in a place that reflects their values,” he said. “If we’re allowing these stereotypes to be perpetuated that are not congruent with their values, they’re not going to move here – or they might move out.”