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Opinion: I just wanna bang on the drum all day

'Exuberant possibility wins out over sad emptiness any day of the week...'
bang da drum
File under: activities to fill the meandering hours while you're not working.

Last summer, as exasperated Whistler business owners looked desperately for warm bodies to staff their businesses, an explanatory narrative emerged.

After more than a year of COVID-19, workers had grown accustomed to the government handouts that had kept them afloat through the pandemic, some business owners reasoned.

Nobody wants to work anymore, they lamented.

And the narrative wasn’t entirely wrong. Some local entrepreneurs heard it straight from the mouths of prospective (or recently former) staff; Pique heard it directly from a small handful of local workers.

“Been milking that government money since [the pandemic started] and I have no shame whatsoever,” one Whistler worker told Pique in June 2021.

“I could easily go back to work if I wanted to but I honestly have no motivation. I’m free to do what I want, when I want. Just one less thing to stress about during these crazy times.”

That quote has stuck with me these past 15 months—a statement both profoundly sad and empty while simultaneously brimming with possibility and exuberance for life—but I digress.

A life without motivation or purpose is not a life for me, but I suppose I can respect the hustle. Carpe diem, YOLO, (and so on).

It would be easy to blame Whistler’s (and Canada’s) current labour crunch on a newfound fondness for sloth and sluggishness—a pervasive, infectious laziness conspiring to cripple the economy.

But the data simply doesn’t support that narrative.

Canada’s unemployment rate is currently just five per cent—the lowest since 1970—while the number of unemployed people for every open job is just 1.2.

“It’s just the ‘slowest moving train on the planet’ called population aging, and it’s happening throughout the global north, and it’s coming to a neighbourhood near you,” said economist Armine Yalnizyan, in an interview with CBC’s Front Burner podcast published Aug. 24.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, almost 600,000 Canadians have passed over the “mythical tripwire” of retirement, phasing out of the workforce, Yalnizyan said.

As the baby boomers conduct their mass exodus from the workforce, younger generations are not entering it at the same pace, and “more people exiting than entering is a huge problem for the labour shortage,” Yalnizyan said.

“The sheer dynamics of the numbers mean that it’s going to be extremely difficult to meet all the job openings that are out there, unless demand shrinks.”

The pandemic has also shifted the workforce in other, not-unsubstantial ways, Yalnizyan added.

The “care economy”—health-care, childcare and schooling—has seen a “mass exodus” of women workers aged 55 to 64, for a variety of reasons, she said, with many opting for early retirement due to burnout.

Then there’s the movement between jobs. Where there are now fewer transportation, agriculture or food service jobs, professional science and technology jobs increased by 20 per cent during the pandemic, Yalnizyan said.

Why not just pay higher wages?

Some industries, like science and tech, absolutely are, Yalnizyan said. But in sectors like hospitality, where margins are already razor thin, business owners don’t have much wiggle room.

“It’s unclear [if] they can’t find people, or they can find people, but not at the wages that they can afford to pay,” she said.

So while every sector has a different story, “you can basically take the labour shortage story to every single sector, and [you’ll hear], ‘I can’t find enough people to do the work, [and then] in parentheses, at the price I’m offering.’”

In Whistler, where labour is a constant source of consternation, the local Chamber of Commerce is developing a new strategy (as it also works towards hiring a new executive director).

The Chamber’s new Community Talent Plan, to be finalized soon, will take a more proactive stance on recruitment.

“We are looking at how the Chamber, along with other partnerships, can be a bit more of the driver of bringing talent to Whistler, providing development opportunities and then helping employers retain those employees for a longer period of time,” said board chair Diana Chan in an interview with Pique last week.

“The board is very excited about it … I think it’s a new way to approach looking at labour within Whistler, rather than try the things we’ve always tried.”

But local leaders have long known that Whistler can only do so much itself; that having understanding from higher levels of government, and policy that aligns with local objectives, is crucial.

On Sept. 10, the Conservative Party of Canada will elect a new leader—though many have already symbolically anointed frontrunner Pierre Poilievre.

Poilievre discussed a wide range of policy positions with Glacier Media’s B.C. editors in a Zoom call on Aug. 28, and had this to say in response to a Pique question on addressing labour shortages:

“I think we need to speed up economic immigration, and we need to make it possible for employers who can’t find Canadian workers to more quickly sponsor skilled immigrants who can fill the void. I believe that an employer-driven approach will ensure that the real demands on the ground drive the decisions rather than the theories of bureaucracy in Ottawa.”

If a construction company can’t fill positions after advertising them, “then they should be able to quickly sponsor new immigrants to come, first as Temporary Foreign Workers, but then those workers should graduate quickly into permanent residency, and eventual citizenship, and the Government of Canada should make that as quick as possible,” Poilievre added.

Demographic change isn’t confined to Canada, Yalnizyan said, pointing out that even places like China are beginning to fret about population aging.

“So we are going to be competing with the rest of the world to find newcomers if we do not make every job a good job—if we do not make more of our communities great places to live,” she told Front Burner.

Yalnizyan doesn’t pretend to have the solution, or the fabled “silver bullet,” but believes demographic change is a good thing, if we want it to be; that we can do better by the workers who are already in Canada.

“How do we value the people that we do have around us, so we don’t burn them out? Because they are working so hard,” she said. “It’s not that people don’t want to work anymore. It is that people can’t work anymore—they’re working as hard as they can.”

We could start by making every job a good job, and offer more opportunities for people to train and advance, Yalnizyan said.

“We could actually improve the size and the resilience of the middle class, if that’s what we wanted to do,” she said. “And as the ninth-largest economy in the world … we can be, and we can do, anything we set our hearts and minds to do.”

Now that’s the kind of positive optimism I can get behind—exuberant possibility wins out over sad emptiness any day of the week, I always say.