VANCOUVER—The unemployment rate in B.C. was lower last month than it has been in over a decade, intensifying a provincial labour shortage that could add pressure to future projects like the LNG Canada plant construction in Kitimat.

Only 3.9 per cent of members of the province’s labour market were without work in September, compared to the national rate of 5.9 per cent. B.C.’s unemployment rate fell by 1.1 percentage points last month, as the province gained 33,000 jobs.

September marked the 20th straight month that B.C.’s unemployment rate remained below 6 per cent. Employers in the province have long reported difficulty finding workers over that time, and have made calls for more interprovincial and international migration to fill the gaps.

Minister of Jobs, Trade and Technology Bruce Ralston said on Friday that, in light of the LNG investment, the U.S.M.C.A. deal, and the employment numbers, it’s been “a great week” for B.C. jobs.

“It’s the lowest unemployment rate among the Canadian provinces, and it fell 1.1 per cent, which is a huge drop,” he said.

But difficulty finding workers is a downside of the tight labour market — and Friday’s numbers show that may be a challenge for the LNG Canada project, which is committed to prioritizing the hiring of B.C. workers.

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Only about 5,200 of those unemployed in September in B.C. were from the construction industry, where 10,000 workers will soon be needed to complete the LNG Canada project in Kitimat. The unemployment rate in construction in B.C. was only 2.1 per cent, the lowest since November 2007.

Tom Sigurdson, executive director of the B.C. Building Trades, said earlier this week that the “vast majority” of construction jobs on the LNG project would be able to be filled by B.C. workers, some of whom would leave jobs in residential construction to work temporarily in Kitimat.

“With the current construction economy, we know that there’s a lot of skilled tradespeople that are not are working in other industries,” he said. “They really want to be part of a major industrial project.”

One economist said that makes sense, as long as the wages on the LNG project are higher than what workers are paid in their current jobs.

“Such a hot labour market should, at some point, be reflected in rapidly rising labour costs,” said David Andolfatto, a professor of economics at Simon Fraser University.

Wages in the construction industry are rising in British Columbia. Average weekly earnings for construction workers was $1,237.88 in July 2018, the most recent month for which data was available. That was a 10 per cent increase over the previous July.

But the wage growth isn’t astronomical, and the weekly construction earnings in B.C. are still lower than the average weekly wage rate for Canada overall, which was $1,272.39.

In that context, Andolfatto said, it shouldn’t take too much to draw workers to Kitimat.

“If unemployment is low but wage growth remains subdued, the implication would be that even moderately higher wages should be able to draw workers to work on LNG projects,” he said.

In the meantime, Ralston said the province’s community benefits agreements on public sector infrastructure projects will help train a new cohort of building trades workers. The agreements set out a quota for the number of apprentices that must be on each public sector job site.

“There’s a real skills shortage — the Red Seal trades have not been trained the way they should be,” Ralston said.

He added projects like LNG should proceed without much of a reliance on temporary foreign workers.

“I’m confident that we’ll be able to supply the necessary workers from within B.C. and secondarily from Canada,” he said.

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Sigurdson said the Statistics Canada numbers also don’t tell the whole story of who may be available for construction work jobs, especially because of their mobile nature.

“There are a lot of workers who will, as soon as they finish one job, they go back into our dispatch system and they’re available for work,” Sigurdson said. “We’ve never been on a project where we’ve not been able to supply the qualified trade at the appropriate time.”

There have been times, though, when the trades have had to “dig deep” to find the people with the right skills to get a project done. In those cases, Sigurdson said, they draw on human resources from other Canadian jurisdictions and a limited number of international workers.

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