Calgary
One-way street
JEN GERSON WRITES
FORT McMURRAY, Alta.–Crystal Chislett hates living in remote Northern Alberta.
It’s lonely here. Women come and go so quickly that girlfriends rarely stick. The men work long shifts. Chislett, 30, misses being surrounded by strangers on the GO train.
“But my fear is that Alberta will be so good to me that I’ll feel too guilty to leave it,” says the native of Toronto while sitting in one of the few coffee shops in Fort McMurray. She left more than a year ago seeking her dream career as a civil servant. “How do you leave a province that has fostered you, and invested in you and given you every chance to develop?”
Career development courses, quick advancement and better wages. It’s also paid off part of the almost $50,000 student debt that had piled up while she earned a straight-A average in McMaster University’s political science program.
Chislett paid off $10,000 of that debt in four months – working at The Keg.
Toronto was once the place young Canadians like Chislett went to to make it. Diplomas in tow, they came from the coasts and the bread baskets, the country spinning around this tiny pinprick in the middle of the map. With the oil boom, that map is beginning to tilt.
Alberta is painting itself as a young, vibrant province, making the region a lucrative prospect for a new generation of mobile and demanding workers.
“It took me how many years to get my formal education in Ontario? And I’m supposed to spend the next 20 in Ontario paying it off? I don’t think so,” Chislett says. “I’ll work here until I can afford to work in a place that I can enjoy.”
She dreams of being a deputy minister, of dictating government policy. She also knows she can get there much faster in Fort McMurray than she can in Toronto.
She thinks it would have taken her another decade to get the position she has now – a career and employment consultant with the province.
Chislett wants to come home but she’s also looking at entering municipal politics, running for a position with the regional municipality of Wood Buffalo.
“And if that happens….” she says with a shrug.
In 2006, Ontario lost about 30,000 people to the Albertan oil boom – numbers not seen since the early ’80s, when gas prices spiked, then dropped just as suddenly. According to Statistics Canada, those people aren’t being replenished by emigration from other provinces. For the first time in more than 20 years, Ontario’s population increase in 2006 was below the national average because so many moved to Alberta. If it weren’t for international immigration, Ontario would have suffered a net loss in population last year.
Kent Carter, 23, took the first job offered to him – an office job in downtown Calgary with Talisman Energy.
Carter was recruited in September from the University of Toronto.
“I figured, I’m young,” he says. “You can pretty much go anywhere before you’re married with kids.” Location isn’t an issue for Carter and his fellow U of T recruits. They don’t limit themselves to Toronto – they’ll take the best jobs. Period.
He’s been enticed by a higher starting wage, relocation expenses and stock options. Some companies offer more vacation time to new graduates.
For the first time in more than a decade, oil companies flooded the U of T campus in September, looking for engineers and earth scientists. The university hasn’t been a recruiting ground for oil companies. Recruitment drives, after all, cost money. It is especially expensive for Shell Canada, as career day visits include a viewing of the company’s trademark Formula One apple-red Ferrari.
This year, that changed.
“The University of Toronto had become a blind spot. We had given up,” says David Fulton, vice-president of human resources with Shell Canada. “There’s a perception that no one would be interested in oil companies in Toronto…the reality is that university students in the east need more persuading to enter the oil industry.”
Compared to its conservative counterparts – the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary – the University of Toronto is perceived as more concerned with greenhouse gas emissions than placing its graduates in lucrative positions in the oil fields.
But the U of T recruitment drive was a success.
“There was huge attendance. We got hundreds of applications and lots were offered jobs. We’ll be back.”
Ontario has no shortage of jobs for engineers, according to John Gamble, president of Consulting Engineers of Ontario. But the province isn’t competing for the engineers it’s got.
“Out of school, the pay is 20 to 30 per cent higher for recent graduates,” he says.
It’s not just the money, the bridges, roads and cities being built in the west are more innovative. Government and industry in the east pick projects that cost the least.
“The public sector here needs to re-evaluate how they select and procure engineering services if they want to compete with Alberta,” Gamble says.
It’s a problem not limited to engineers: there are labour shortages for almost all jobs in Alberta. They’re recruiting nurses, doctors, firefighters, police officers, bus drivers, emergency paramedics, construction workers, accountants, lawyers, human resource, communication and marketing professionals.
Calgary municipal recruiters are continuing to scout southern Ontario job fairs for workers laid off from car plants.
“This is new territory for us to go in,” says Ken Wilson, recruitment co-ordinator for Calgary Fire. Calgary will be opening five new fire halls and there are openings for 160 firefighters in the next year. “There’s no fire experience needed,” he says, adding that Calgary is the only municipality that will pay the $10,000 required for firefighters to be trained and certified.
“There are no cold skills anymore,” Fulton says. “They’re all hot.”
The drive for talent is aggressive and competitive. Like the red Ferrari being shown off in the career centres of Canadian universities, Alberta is being sold as glamorous, an exciting, high-energy place where an ambitious worker with a good attitude and the right skills can make more money, earn a better job and win their own office right out of school – a Calgary tradition born of the days of dirt-cheap commercial real estate.
“Recruitment has essentially become like marketing,” Fulton says. “Everyone is trying to get an edge over the competition.”
For all its wealth, Calgary is not a destination for indie rock tours.
The scene is decent, but Evan Hillman, 30, can’t find quite as many concerts as he’s used to, having grown up in North Toronto.
But “there’s a nice old theatre on 8th St. where they show independent films,” he says.
We are sitting in a retro-themed café populated by pierced baristas on 17th Ave. – Calgary’s Queen St. W, but with more franchises and a wider street to accommodate more cars. Hillman sports a shaved head, thick glasses and a James Dean T-shirt under a collared shirt and a leather jacket.
He loves being a corporate and securities lawyer.
A graduate of York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, Hillman passed the bar exam, completed his time as an articling student and searched for a job in corporate and securities law for about a year.
Sure, he found positions in litigation and in insurance law, but nothing in the field he wanted to pursue.
He wasn’t in the right networks and hadn’t made enough contacts to edge his way into a law firm that specialized in finance – his passion.
Then he ran across a newspaper article. Calgary’s booming, it said. On a whim, he went online and landed a job in the Calgary office of Blake Cassels & Graydon, one of Canada’s largest law firms.
Alberta is a province where, unlike Toronto, the job you get is commensurate with the one you’re trained to do – rather than the people you know, he says.
“If I didn’t (move) would be unlikely that I’d be doing now what I’m doing,” Hillman says.
While he misses his home, he doesn’t plan on returning unless his employers move him. Everyone here seems to be young, he says. Everyone seems to be from somewhere else.
“If your goal is your career, as opposed to where you live – especially if you’re just starting out – then you should consider Calgary.”
Though he’s a lawyer, Hillman is tied to the oil and gas industry. Like the men and women who search and extract crude, he’s not worried about his job petering out.
Those investing billions in the province are betting that the wells aren’t going to dry up anytime soon.
The last Alberta oil boom in the early 1980s was followed by a devastating bust, jobs became scarce and housing prices plummeted – a spectre that looms over every house purchase and permanent hire here.
Oil has to sell for more than $30 a barrel in order for the intricate and sifting of crude from sandy soil to be profitable.
When the price of oil began to climb, Canadian oil companies had a choice: mine the oil sands for as long as the profit holds, as they did in the 1980s, or invest in expanding the wells and building infrastructure, gambling that the price of crude would stay high, and go even higher.
The oil companies have placed their bets. By 2015, oil and gas companies will have pumped $80 billion into the soil.
They are betting this boom isn’t going away any faster than oil and gas itself.
“This isn’t a sunset industry,” says Shell’s Fulton. This is not the 1980s. Companies here say they aren’t hiring for the short term.
Through her job as a career counsellor in Fort McMurray, Crystal Chislett sees the least prepared of the boomtown job seekers.
It gets worse in the summer, when university students wanting to pay off their loans show up on her doorstep with nothing but a duffel bag asking for work.
The work is here, it’s advertised in neon print, foot-high: “Hiring – Good wages” by the outlet stores and strip malls. But with the cost of rent and food rivalling Toronto – in a town that only has one Starbucks – the under-prepared and untrained are sent home.
“The people here are either making a lot of money. Or they’re making no money,” Chislett says. “The people thought they were coming to a town paved with gold.”
Those who have turned to Alberta to fast track their careers say Ontario is operating as if it doesn’t have any competition. It’s not fighting to keep its skilled tradespeople and young graduates.
Meanwhile Alberta, the new land of opportunity is not without its problems. The Ferrari that Shell uses as eye candy for young engineering students is supposed to sit in its downtown headquarters when it’s not being shipped across the country for campus career days.
It’s not there now because the lobby is being renovated. The ceiling is uncovered, stone tiles ripped from the walls, wires dangling, raw boards fencing off the unsafe areas between the escalators.
The project was supposed to be finished by now, but the construction crew abandoned the site in December when they found a better job up the street.
That leaves a company that’s investing billions in oil sands with an unfinished lobby and no place to park its trademark fire-engine-red sports car.
