Help wanted

At first glance, it seemed like a quick and easy fix for the Fairmont Chateau Whistler’s labour crunch. Faced with a staffing shortage of alarming proportions last fall, management at the five-star resort hotel launched an effort to import 80 temporary workers from the Philippines.

The two-step process – a labour market opinion (LMO) from Service Canada and a few dozen temporary-resident visas from the Canadian embassy in Manila – was supposed to take about 12 weeks. But the LMO, the official verification that the employer is unable to find qualified workers in Canada, didn’t arrive until June. Hotel staff then travelled to the Philippines to select the candidates and applied for their two-year temporary-resident visas in July. Four months later, the visa approvals came through and, in late November, the workers began arriving on Canadian soil.

Twelve weeks had become 12 months.

“Yes, the whole process between last December and now was long and complicated,” admits Michelle Graham, the hotel’s HR director. “Certainly, it was not quite the three-month process.”

The Chateau Whistler isn’t the only B.C. employer to find the task of importing foreign workers
mired in red tape and bureaucratic delays. Far from it. Since the province’s jobless rate dipped below five per cent in early 2006 – perilously close to full employment in the eyes of many economists – a growing number of B.C. employers have been looking abroad to fill their labour needs.

Just three years ago, B.C.’s jobless rate was 7.2 per cent. In December that number was hovering around 4.2 per cent, the lowest in 30 years. The national jobless rate hit 5.8 per cent last fall – also a 30-year low – before creeping up one-tenth of a percentage point by Christmas.

As a result, foreign workers have become a sought-after commodity, with demand increasing by 40 per cent in B.C. and close to 200 per cent in Alberta in the first six months of 2007.

John Leschyson, HR director of the Go2 Tourism HR Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping B.C.’s hospitality sector battle the labour shortage, says temporary foreign workers were unheard of in the industry two years ago. Since then, B.C. hotel, restaurant and resort owners have filed close to 3,000 LMO requests.

That demand has driven a surge in the number of HR consultants and job-placement agencies peddling their services to desperate employers.

“I know of at least half

a dozen new agencies in the tourism industry, and it’s happening in other industries too,” says Leschyson.

It’s a trend that Graham has noticed at the Chateau Whistler as well. “There are lots of agencies knocking on the door,” she says. “The hard part is trying to figure out which agency is reputable.”

Even though demand is high, it has been a bumpy ride for these new consultants, as employers and recruiters alike are discovering that getting foreign workers from point A to point B isn’t as easy as it seems. Just ask Christine Stoneman.

Late in 2006, Stoneman and her partners at Chemistry Consulting in Victoria saw the growing demand for foreign labour and added overseas recruiting to the company’s roster of services. In February the company applied for an LMO from Service Canada, hoping to import 40 Filipino hotel and restaurant workers in time for the 2007 high season.

The LMO approval alone took four months. Stoneman, who travelled to the Philippines in June to interview potential candidates, recalls that the Canadian embassy in Manila was flooded with applications from Filipinos with jobs waiting for them in Canada. “I was just floored by the wall-to-ceiling boxes of files coming in almost by the minute,” Stoneman says.

Overworked visa officers, employees of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, finally managed to process Chemistry Consulting’s employee applications by early November. By mid-December Chemistry had placed Filipino service-industry workers at hotels in Courtenay, Victoria, Tofino and Whistler.

“I thought, ‘Finally! God, it took long enough,’” says Stoneman. “It took a year, but now we’re in the loop, so hopefully things will move along a little more quickly.”

The snail’s pace of approvals can also be traced to federal immigration policies that have been slow to adapt to changing conditions. The bulk of immigrant workers have historically been mid- to high-level professionals who, under federal regulations, are allowed to stay longer and have a better chance of gaining landed-immigrant status than lower-skilled workers.

But demand to bring in low-skilled workers has grown substan­tially in the last few years. More stringent ­regulations govern this group, reflecting Ottawa’s focus on protecting Canadian jobs and making sure foreign workers aren’t exploited. And those long-standing political and social concerns have further contributed to the backlog of LMO applications.

To be fair, the federal government has recognized the problem and come up with at least a partial solution. In January federal human resources and social development minister Monte Solberg pledged to expand a pilot program to fast-track a limited number of job categories through the LMO process in Alberta and B.C. The Expedited Labour Market Opinion program (E-LMO), launched in the fall, initially covered room attendants, desk clerks, counter attendants in retail sales, food and beverage servers, dental technicians, pharmacists, registered nurses, carpenters, crane operators and ski instructors.

The expanded plan, which covers 21 more jobs, many of them in the construction sector, will address about 50 per cent of the total demand for LMOs, Solberg says. “We wanted to get an indication of how effective this would be… So far the results are pretty encouraging.”