The skills gap that the federal government says is threatening Canada's economy is much smaller than advertised and in fact in better shape now that it's been for most of the past two decades, a major Canadian bank says.
Officials at the Department of Finance and other policymakers have been banging the drum in recent weeks about a growing skills gap — a chasm between the number of available jobs, and a lack of qualified applicants to fill them because they don't have the right skills.
"The skills mismatch in Canada has gained extraordinary prominence in recent weeks, with the federal budget highlighting the issue," BMO economist Doug Porter said in a report published late Tuesday.
A key plank of the budget was a new subsidy called the Canada Job Grant of up to $5,000 to be matched by the provinces. It was aimed at offsetting the expenses that any company undertakes associated with retraining a worker for an available job. It's clear policymakers think a skills gap is holding Canada's economy back.
Plenty of jobs?
People tend to focus on the jobless rate — the percentage of working-age people who have any sort of job — when gauging the health of an economy.
Currently, Canada's national unemployment rate is seven per cent. That's much lower than it was during the depths of the recession. But many private sector groups and some within the federal government warn that the number belies the reality of the job market, which is that there aren't enough qualified people to work badly needed jobs in the fast-growing resources sector.
But a report from Bank of Montreal published late Tuesday questions that narrative, pointing out that only 25 per cent of companies polled in the Bank of Canada's latest business outlook survey reported a lack of qualified workers. That's actually 10 percentage points below the 15-year average of 35 per cent.
Even smoothing out the last two quarters of data still gives a below-average reading of 29 per cent, Porter noted in his report.
"What's more, for today's seven per cent unemployment rate, that share of firms reporting shortages is especially low," Porter noted.
In the chart above, Porter shows that the last time the jobless rate was at the seven per cent level (in the two shaded areas representing 2004-2005 and 1999, more than 40 per cent of firms were reporting skills shortages. So the current reading of 25 per cent is actually much better than things used to be.
"Finally, most major wage measures are crawling along at about a [two per cent annual] pace — a strangely subdued pace if we are facing acute skills shortages," Porter says.
Officials within the Department of Finance did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CBC News.
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