Despite vast employment opportunities, workers are not relocating to Alberta on a permanent basis, according to the latest data from Statistics Canada.
The latest statistics show that workers are increasingly headed to Alberta where job vacancy rates are particularly high, but only one in every four of those workers seems intent on staying there.
Three of four workers who moved to Alberta between 2004 and 2009 continued to file tax returns in a different province, which some experts say is indicative of their intent not to remain in the province permanently.
“It is likely that factors such as family ties, social networks, organizational arrangements (e.g. daycare, school enrolment), home ownership and quality of life were important factors [in keeping ties to home provinces],” wrote Christine Laporte, Yuqian Lu and Grant Schellenberg in their study for Statistics Canada.
Most of the workers arriving in Alberta at that time were young males, under the age of 35, working in the construction sector. They most often came from British Columbia, Saskatchewan and the Eastern Maritime Provinces.
The highest number of interprovincial workers appeared in 2008, when 133,000 workers came to Alberta from other provinces, making up approximately 6.2 percent of the total workforce.
For years Alberta has been plagued with labour shortages, particularly in the construction and energy sectors, which have most driven the province’s economic growth.
Source: Ottawa Citizen