Immigration is not the silver bullet to growing our labour force

It has been said that “demographics are destiny” and this can’t possibly be more true anywhere than it is in New Brunswick. Population growth, or perhaps more specifically, labour force growth, is by far the most urgent public policy issue facing our province and addressing this could solve many other challenges.

Other problems that preoccupy our politics are just symptoms of our demographic challenge.  

• Deficits?  They would be easily resolved if we had more workers paying taxes and spending disposable income. 
  

• Wait times in health care?  Wouldn’t have them if we attracted more doctors and nurses.
  

• More jobs?  It is the chicken and the egg; many companies can’t expand or locate here because they can’t fill all of the positions they need to make a go of it.  It is a frustrating irony that we have thousands who can’t find jobs and dozens of businesses that can’t fill jobs.
  

• School closures?  If we had more young people, we would need more schools, not fewer.

Unfortunately, those who recognize the importance of this issue generally focus a disproportionate amount of resources on immigration and that is wrong-headed.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love immigration.  The better understanding of the world and more well-rounded cultural awareness that my children are gaining growing up in a multicultural school as compared to how I grew up is amazing.  Our province is richer for sharing in the diverse cultures that immigrants bring to our communities.

But immigration is hard.  First, we do not control our own fate.  We must rely on the federal government to allocate immigration slots to us and to process and authorize applications.  Second,  immigrants are hard to find.  We need to sift through 8 billion people and find those with the right skills, demographics and interests.  Third, once we get them here, there may be a lot of effort required in language training and credential recognition.  Fourth, once they are integrated into the workforce we must convince them to stay here while there are larger cities with more opportunities and better access to their native language and culture.

Immigration is among the hardest of ways to grow our workforce.  Instead, we could:

• Attract youth to return.  I come from a generation where the majority of my high school classmates no longer live in New Brunswick.  That is probably true of most generations of New Brunswickers.  The vast majority of those who have left would love to return.  But they are living fulfilling lives with good jobs and busy families.  There is no incentive for them to figure out how to find perhaps two jobs in the same city halfway across the country, sell and buy homes and uproot their children.  But these people already know and love New Brunswick, they do not need to be convinced to come home.  Finding them jobs and helping them with moving expenses would close the deal.  We need to create a service like this to bring people home.
  

• Create opportunities to retain youth. We need to invest in a culture of training and apprenticeship.  We need government policies and programs that are youth-friendly.  Too often graduates can’t find jobs in their fields here because they lack two years of experience.  That gap has to be closed through collaboration between government and the private sector.  And we need to make sure that when those gaps are closed, this is a place where young people want to live.
  

• Help people to (re-)enter the workforce. Statistics Canada measures the labour force participation rate.  This is the percentage of people aged 15 and older who are working or looking for work.  In New Brunswick, the participation rate hovers around 62%, while the national average is 66% and in Alberta it is 72%.  These don’t sound like huge differences, but if we raised our participation rate by 4 points to the national average that would add 25,000 workers to our economy without anyone having had to move here.  How do we help those who have given up on finding or never tried to find a job get into the workforce?
  

• Focus on interprovincial migration. Many Canadians and other permanent residents of Canada don’t know about what New Brunswick has to offer.  Think of this as easy immigration.  We are searching in a pool of 37 million instead of 8 billion and they can move here tomorrow without any permits or applications.  So much has been written about millennials and the generation coming behind them and their inability to afford homeownership or save for the future due to the double whammy of high student debt and high cost of living.  New Brunswick needs young professionals.  Toronto and Vancouver have young professionals living in basement apartments paying $2,000 per month in rent.  Is there not a mutually-beneficial arrangement to be had here?  Come to New Brunswick, solve our labour shortage, live in your dream home for half the cost of your rent and apply the rest to your student debt. 
  

We must do all of these things, including immigration.  But the focus of some on immigration as a priority above others is akin to climbing a ladder to get the apples from the top of the tree while ignoring the low-hanging fruit below.

We have never been particularly good at marketing our province.  We derisively refer to ourself as the “drive-thru province” because PEI, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland have built so much more effective tourism brands.  When I lived in Ontario, it was a common occurrence for people to be able to easily list three Atlantic Provinces; New Brunswick was always the one they forgot.  We must do better.  New Brunswick is a great province, that’s why I came back here to raise a family.  We all know this.  We need to do a better job of spreading the word.

A smart population growth strategy continues the current focus on immigration.  But it also invests as much or more effort in marketing New Brunswick to millennials and others across the country that would be far better positioned to achieve their dreams here than in costly cities like Toronto or Vancouver.  It invests by leveling the playing field and giving a hand up to those who can’t break into the labour force such as people with disabilities and people trying to break the cycle of multigenerational poverty.  It ensures that no young person has to leave to find their first job in their field.  And it provides those ex-New Brunswickers who would love our province to come home and gives them an easy path to do so.