TORONTO —
Let’s start with the obvious: It is not a good time to be looking for work.
Canada’s economy shed nearly two million jobs – a record – in April, on top of one million in March. The national unemployment rate sits at 13 per cent, and would be even higher had 1.1 million Canadians not given up entirely on trying to find a job amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
But for every Canadian who stopped looking for work last month, there are two who were still attempting to land some sort of employment.
Despite a seemingly never-ending flood of layoffs and bankruptcies, hiring is happening – just at a much slower pace. Job website Indeed says the number of postings it is receiving is roughly half of its 2019 average. Ontario and Quebec, the two provinces hit hardest by the pandemic, have seen the biggest drops.
Brendon Bernard, an economist with Indeed, told CTVNews.ca on Wednesday that the “major shock to the system” caused by the pandemic seems to have stabilized since posting levels bottomed out in mid-April.
“We’ve been pretty stable for a few weeks now. We’re kind of in this holding pattern,” he said via telephone.
Those who work directly to match up employers looking to hire with prospective workers also see reasons for optimism.
“Believe it or not, there are opportunities,” Garrett Hein, who works for the Express Employment Professionals staffing agency in Sarnia, Ont., told CTVNews.ca via telephone on Wednesday.
“We are trying to tell people ‘Don’t get discouraged; we will turn the corner’ – and we are starting to turn the corner now, slowly.”
JOBS LOST, AND NOT
Not every part of the economy was affected equally by the pandemic-induced crash in the jobs market, and not every sector is rebounding in the same way either.
According to Statistics Canada, job losses were largely concentrated in major industries where working from home is impossible, including retail, restaurants, hotels, construction and manufacturing.
The service sector has also been where Indeed has seen the biggest drop in activity, with postings for jobs in beauty and wellness, food preparation and service, and hospitality and tourism all down by more than 60 per cent.
Jessica Culo, who owns an Express Employment Professionals franchise in Edmonton, says administration-type jobs – including administrative assistants, receptionists, data-entry and customer-service roles – were also among the first to lose their jobs.
Many of those positions are now being filled once again as governments begin to loosen restrictions on gatherings and workplaces, Culo told CTVNews.ca on Wednesday via telephone.
“Administration is the one that’s leading right now, as far as what companies are advertising (for) and what they’re looking to bring back,” she said.
While every industry has seen drops in job postings on Indeed, the decreases have been relatively mild in a few fields. Chief among those is health care, where the drop has been just over 20 per cent.
“You have job openings holding up relatively well for doctors and nurses, as well as personal support workers (and) health-care aides,” Bernard said.
Security and public protection postings are next on that list, down by 32 per cent, while advertisements for positions in software development are down by 38 per cent.
Culo, whose agency works with more than 1,500 businesses in the Edmonton area, said construction jobs are returning as well, and employers are also looking for truck drivers – a role where the labour shortage is so significant in Canada that even a pandemic couldn’t stop it.
Some of these roles are entry-level, but hiring is also happening for more professional positions. In southwestern Ontario, Hein’s agency is seeing an uptick in administration jobs as well – but also positions “in all kinds of fields” including accounting and engineering, and even some light industrial work.
Still, Hein estimates that it will take “several months” for hiring levels to return to anything like what they were before the shutdown, with many companies playing catch-up on pre-pandemic recruitment efforts.
“Talking to companies, I think the first thing we’re going to see is companies resuming hiring that was put on hold,” he said.
WHERE WILL THE DEMAND BE?
Then there are the new jobs being created as companies gear up to return to something resembling normal operations. In Alberta, it is recommended that businesses screen all workers for possible symptoms of COVID-19 and mandated that anyone displaying cold-like symptoms not be allowed to remain in the workplace.
Some employers are responding to this by creating new positions in health and safety administration, such as greeters at construction sites who screen workers as they arrive and record their findings.
It isn’t just because of government orders, as Culo sees it. Workers – especially those who live with those at higher risk of contracting COVID-19 – are also more concerned about workplace health and safety than they were before the pandemic, leading companies to develop new policies around health and train their employees on them. This creates even more potential for new jobs in this area.
“All organizations are looking to enhance their health and safety programs,” Culo said.
“Companies have to make sure that they’re going overboard in that communication, because they need their employees to feel safe.”
On the national scale, Hein expects that once workplaces open back up, some of the biggest hiring sprees will be embarked upon in manufacturing facilities and warehouses, while there will also be demand for machinists.
There will also be shifts as businesses adjust their operations to match the changed expectations of the public. Bernard brings up the example of retail, where there might be less need for in-store workers in the near future as consumers opt for placing orders on their computers.
“They might see some customers [in the store], but will those numbers be enough to really support bringing back a full workforce, or half of it? We just don’t know at this point,” he said.
“At least temporarily, there’s going to be a significant shift to online – and that might create a demand for certain workers in other areas.”
Even when open positions exist, though, businesses may have ideas about how to fill them that don’t involve hiring strangers who sent in resumes. Culo said many of the businesses she has talked to plan to bring back the workers they laid off during the pandemic before looking at other hiring pools.
Given that, she said, patience and adaptability are key skills for anyone currently seeking a new job.
“We’re telling people to be patient and to really consider all options. Don’t turn down something that you don’t think is totally within your wheelhouse. If you’re being offered a flex or a contract role, consider it,” she said.
“Proximity is power. Get near what you want to be doing, and you might open doors for yourself.”
CALGARY – MEG Energy says it earned $167 million in its third quarter, down from $249 million during the same quarter last year.
The company says revenues for the quarter were $1.27 billion, down from $1.44 billion during the third quarter of 2023.
Diluted earnings per share were 62 cents, down from 86 cents a year earlier.
MEG Energy says it successfully completed its debt reduction strategy, reducing its net debt to US$478 million by the end of September, down from US$634 million during the prior quarter.
President and CEO Darlene Gates said moving forward all the company’s free cash flow will be returned to shareholders through expanded share buybacks and a quarterly base dividend.
The company says its capital expenditures for the quarter increased to $141 million from $83 million a year earlier, mainly due to higher planned field development activity, as well as moderate capacity growth projects.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
Premier David Eby is proposing an all-party committee investigate mistakes made during the British Columbia election vote tally, including an uncounted ballot box and unreported votes in three-quarters of the province’s 93 ridings.
The proposal comes after B.C.’s chief electoral officer blamed extreme weather, long working hours and a new voting system for human errors behind the mistakes in last month’s count, though none were large enough to change the initial results.
Anton Boegman says the agency is already investigating the mistakes to “identify key lessons learned” to improve training, change processes or make recommendations for legislative change.
He says the uncounted ballot box containing about 861 votes in Prince George-Mackenzie was never lost, and was always securely in the custody of election officials.
Boegman says a failure in five districts to properly report a small number of out-of-district votes, meanwhile, rippled through to the counts in 69 ridings.
Eby says the NDP will propose that a committee examine the systems used and steps taken by Elections BC, then recommend improvements in future elections.
“I look forward to working with all MLAs to uphold our shared commitment to free and fair elections, the foundation of our democracy,” he said in a statement Tuesday, after a news conference by Boegman.
Boegman said if an independent review does occur, “Elections BC will, of course, fully participate in that process.”
He said the mistakes came to light when a “discrepancy” of 14 votes was noticed in the riding of Surrey-Guildford, spurring a review that increased the number of unreported votes there to 28.
Surrey-Guildford was the closest race in the election and the NDP victory there gave Eby a one-seat majority. The discovery reduced the NDP’s victory margin from 27 to 21, pending the outcome of a judicial review that was previously triggered because the race was so close.
The mistakes in Surrey-Guildford resulted in a provincewide audit that found the other errors, Boegman said.
“These mistakes were a result of human error. Our elections rely on the work of over 17,000 election officials from communities across the province,” he said.
“Election officials were working 14 hours or more on voting days and on final voting day in particular faced extremely challenging weather conditions in many parts of the province.
“These conditions likely contributed to these mistakes,” he said.
B.C.’s “vote anywhere” model also played a role in the errors, said Boegman, who said he had issued an order to correct the results in the affected ridings.
Boegman said the uncounted Prince George-Mackenzie ballot box was used on the first day of advance voting. Election officials later discovered a vote hadn’t been tabulated, so they retabulated the ballots but mistakenly omitted the box of first-day votes, only including ballots from the second day.
Boegman said the issues discovered in the provincewide audit will be “fully documented” in his report to the legislature on the provincial election, the first held using electronic tabulators.
He said he was confident election officials found all “anomalies.”
B.C. Conservative Party Leader John Rustad had said on Monday that the errors were “an unprecedented failure by the very institution responsible for ensuring the fairness and accuracy of our elections.”
Rustad said he was not disputing the outcomes as judicial recounts continue, but said “it’s clear that mistakes like these severely undermine public trust in our electoral process.”
Rustad called for an “independent review” to make sure the errors never happen again.
Boegman, who said the election required fewer than half the number of workers under the old paper-based system, said results for the election would be returned in 90 of the province’s 93 ridings on Tuesday.
Full judicial recounts will be held in Surrey-Guildford and Kelowna-Centre, while a partial recount of the uncounted box will take place in Prince George-Mackenzie.
Boegman said out-of-district voting had been a part of B.C.’s elections for many decades, and explained how thousands of voters utilized the province’s vote-by-phone system, calling it a “very secure model” for people with disabilities.
“I think this is a unique and very important part of our elections, providing accessibility to British Columbians,” he said. “They have unparalleled access to the ballot box that is not found in other jurisdictions in Canada.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
WINNIPEG – A public memorial honouring former judge, senator and chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into residential schools, Murray Sinclair, is set to take place in Winnipeg on Sunday.
The event, which is being organized by the federal and Manitoba governments, will be at Canada Life Centre, home of the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets.
Sinclair died Monday in a Winnipeg hospital at the age of 73.
A teepee and a sacred fire were set up outside the Manitoba legislature for people to pay their respects hours after news of his death became public. The province has said it will remain open to the public until Sinclair’s funeral.
Sinclair’s family continues to invite people to visit the sacred fire and offer tobacco.
The family thanked the public for sharing words of love and support as tributes poured in this week.
“The significance of Mazina Giizhik’s (the One Who Speaks of Pictures in the Sky) impact and reach cannot be overstated,” the family said in a statement on Tuesday, noting Sinclair’s traditional Anishinaabe name.
“He touched many lives and impacted thousands of people.”
They encourage the public to celebrate his life and journey home.
A visitation for extended family, friends and community is also scheduled to take place Wednesday morning.
Leaders from across Canada shared their memories of Sinclair.
Premier Wab Kinew called Sinclair one of the key architects of the era of reconciliation.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Sinclair was a teacher, a guide and a friend who helped the country navigate tough realities.
Sinclair was the first Indigenous judge in Manitoba — the second in Canada.
He served as co-chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba to examine whether the justice system was failing Indigenous people after the murder of Helen Betty Osborne and the police shooting death of First Nations leader J.J. Harper.
In leading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he participated in hundreds of hearings across Canada and heard testimony from thousands of residential school survivors.
The commissioners released their widely influential final report in 2015, which described what took place at the institutions as cultural genocide and included 94 calls to action.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
