A close look at what happened to an industry once flush with employment opportunities
For years, job seekers saw the mining industry as flush with promise. A skills shortage made for plentiful job opportunities, generous salaries and lots of chances to travel. “That’s actually what attracts them: money first and travel second, by a huge proportion,” says Scott Dunbar, the interim head of the University of British Columbia’s mining engineering department, citing frequent inter-program surveys. “The actual interest in the work involved seems not to play a big role,” he adds, laughing.
But in the last year, Canadian mining has gone from riches to, if not rags, then at least extreme restraint. In early December, Potash Corp. laid off 18 per cent of its workforce—more than 1,000 people—with about half of those cuts coming from its home province of Saskatchewan. Earlier in the year, Barrick Gold said it would lay off 30 per cent of its office staff. Other companies are joining in the cuts. At the same time, Statistics Canada data show the job market in resources has become far less favourable over the past two years.
The agency’s unemployment-to-job-vacancies ratio for the mining and energy sector—a measure of the number of unemployed people for each available job—reached 3.5 in October, the most recent month for which data are available. That’s slightly higher than the average for all industrial sectors. By contrast, during the same month in 2011, the figure was 1.1, giving mining the tightest job market of any sector at the time. It all portends an increasingly difficult-to-crack marketplace for job seekers.
Greg Dobbelsteyn can speak first-hand of that difficulty. He found a job in mineral exploration right after graduating from McGill University in 2011, and says almost all his classmates found work immediately, too. But when he helped to staff his company’s booth at a major mining convention in March, he saw a stark difference. “The atmosphere was pretty grim,” he says. “Only a handful of companies were actively looking to hire, and many companies that looked healthy just a year earlier were looking desperate. I know a lot of my friends have struggled to find jobs over the past year, though most seem to have landed something eventually.”
The employment drought is due to a number of factors. According to a 2013 report by Ernst & Young, mining investment in Canada flatlined in 2012, with the industry’s eye turning firmly toward developing countries, where the political risks may be higher, but so, too, are potential rewards. Weaker commodity prices have also buffeted the industry.
Talan Iscan, a professor of economics at Dalhousie University, says oil, potash, copper and other metals—Canada’s primary resource exports—have a huge exposure to fickle global markets, and commodities are subject to regular boom-or-bust cycles. “We seem to be going through another phase of declining commodity prices, and we’re not exactly sure how long it’s going to last,” he says.
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