National Post 29/05/2012 by John Ivison

Canada is facing labour shortages and most of its slack supply, such as the east coast provinces, has already been tapped. A study by Raymond James Investments earlier this year suggested cost inflation because of lack of available labour will be the major constraint on growth in the oil sands.

The Canadian Energy Research Institute has estimated the oil sands will require more than 450,000 positions filled across Canada annually.

The challenge is clear – to marry the one remaining pool of slack supply – the aboriginal community – to the jobs that desperately need to be filled.

So far, so obvious. Less well known is how badly we are faring at that task.

In Saskatchewan, which has an unemployment rate of 4.9%, 48.1% of natives on reserves are on income assistance. In Alberta, with the same unemployment rate, that number is 36.6%; in British Columbia (6.2%) natives on income assistance total 19.2%; in Manitoba (5.3%) it’s 50%.

Ontario has an unemployment rate of 7.8%, but 22.6% of natives on reserve are on income assistance. Dalton McGuinty, the Ontario Premier, called last week for more federal help to upgrade skill levels for First Nations to kick-start the development of the Ring of Fire area in northern Ontario.

Yet it’s not as if training is not already available. The Human Resources and Skills Development website has an alphabet spaghetti of training programs – the Aboriginal Skills and Employment Training Strategy, the Aboriginal Skills and Employment Partnership, the Skills and Partnership Fund and so on. In addition, companies keen to hire aboriginal workers often pay for their own training. When De Beers established the $1-billion Victor diamond mine in northern Ontario, it set aside $10-million for skills training for natives from the nearby Attawapiskat reserve, only to find the numbers involved were far fewer than anticipated.

Perhaps those programs are badly tailored to their target market. But there may be a more elementary reason why take-up is low.

As with the overly generous Employment Insurance regime, the federal government provides a range of welfare programs for natives on reserve, with little enforcement when it comes to accepting work that is often available in more accessible reserves. There are 1,200 aboriginal communities within 200km of producing mines or exploratory properties and, while the numbers of native workers is increasing, there are still jobs unfilled.

This is not to suggest natives on reserve are any more lazy than any other sector of society – just that they have more opportunity to smack the government piñata and watch the money fall out.

There are some signs of improvement. The Saskatchewan government recently reported aboriginal employment increased by 16% in the first quarter of this year. Native employment growth in the province has averaged 2% a year from 2007 to 2011.

Saskatchewan is pioneering a new program called Active Measures with First Nations and Ottawa aimed at moving young people off income assistance by providing better access to career planning, literacy programs, training allowances, transport and child care.

These kind of tri-partite agreements seem to be the best hope of moving away from what Assembly of First Nations chief Shawn Atleo calls “failed colonial policies.”

But, as with the winners of the “Lotto 10:42” employment insurance bonanza, those stubbornly high income assistance numbers on reserve won’t budge as long as the state provides subsistence for no work.