CALGARY—Nearly 3,000 workers in Alberta’s oil and gas industry left or lost their jobs between April and May, according to labour market data, while the province’s economy sees a shift toward employment in the health care and education sectors.

Data from Petroleum Labour Market Information (PetroLMI), a division of Energy Safety Canada which compiles labour market information within the country’s oil and gas industry, found oil and gas employment in Alberta decreased by 2.02 per cent. The total labour force, including unemployed workers looking for jobs in the industry, went down by 1.17 per cent.

Oil and gas support activity jobs — such as those in drilling, hydraulic fracturing and exploration — were the hardest hit. According to PetroLMI, around 6,600 oil and gas jobs have been lost in Alberta so far this year, with a predicted total of 12,500 by the end of 2019.

Carol Howes, vice-president of communications and the PetroLMI division, said the losses are partially due to the “spring break-up,” a slowdown period for the industry where thawing frost makes the earth muddy and unsuitable for drilling. But she said the effects of last year’s provincial curtailment plan, along with lower overall investment in oil and gas, could mean the losses continue.

“We don’t expect to see any significant change over the coming months and even into 2020,” she said.

May’s losses can be explained by spring break-up, explained Ben Brunnen, vice-president of fiscal and economic policy for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, a lobby group for the oil and gas industry.

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“This is largely pretty cyclical for our sector,” Brunnen said. “The real key is looking at our jobs from an overall trend perspective.”

When global oil prices plummeted in 2014, triggering a major recession in Alberta, the oil industry shed an enormous number of jobs, mainly in oil and gas support activities and construction. Investment also declined from about $80 billion nationwide to $37 billion, Brunnen said. This trend has occurred across the global oil and gas industry for the last three years, according to a report from the International Energy Industry, and is only recovering in 2019.

Even the recent approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project won’t necessarily mean an immediate fix for workers looking to find jobs in the sector. Oil is expected to flow through the 1,150-kilometre pipeline between Edmonton and Burnaby, B.C., by mid-2022.

“The impact of that kind of a project is still two years down the road,” she said. “So the immediate issue is not going to be resolved any time soon.”

Trevor Tombe, an associate professor in the University of Calgary’s department of economics, said support activities employment recovered somewhat through 2017, but began stagnating last year. In April 2019, there were 43,220 support jobs in oil and gas, according to Statistics Canada data. Before the recession hit, there were nearly 80,000. During the recession’s worst period, Tombe added, there were around 40,000 support jobs.

“It has fallen quite a bit,” Tombe said of the most recent losses. “But it has fallen even over the past six months or so.”

Declining investment in oil and gas is partially to blame, Tombe said. But even if investors decided to pour money into Alberta’s oil and gas industry as they did before the downturn, not all support activity jobs would come back. The recession forced companies to become far more efficient.

“Absolutely no question … companies have reduced their operating costs significantly through the recession,” Tombe said. “So even if oil prices rise back up to their prior high — which I don’t think that they will — we’re not going to see these support activity jobs back at their pre-recession level.”

He also noted the composition of Alberta’s labour market is changing overall. The private sector, particularly mining, construction and associated manufacturing, have seen large drops in employment over the past several years.

Job vacancies in oil-and-gas extraction, mining, and quarrying dropped significantly — 58.8 per cent — between the first quarter of 2018 and 2019, according to a Statistics Canada report on payroll employment, earnings and hours released Thursday. Construction vacancies dropped by 21.5 per cent.

“In terms of payroll employment levels, in early 2019, mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction; construction; manufacturing; and professional, scientific and technical services all remained below their previous 2014 highs,” the report read.

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According to Statistics Canada data Tombe compiled and graphed, overall job creation since Alberta’s recession started is taking place in just three sectors: health care, education and public administration. His graph suggests there’s been little change in private payroll jobs since June 2017.

Yet Tombe said Alberta retains the strongest economy in the country, although the recession narrowed the margins between it and other provinces.

“Certainly, we are below where we were, but we have a stronger economy than the rest of the country,” he said.

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