Touting more affordable housing and higher wages, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is seeking to reverse the wave of interprovincial migration with a new advertising campaign.
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Alberta Premier Jason Kenney may find it harder than he expects to get Canadians, particularly those in Vancouver and Toronto, to move to his province in search of affordable housing and lower taxes.
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On Monday, Kenney launched a $2.6 million investment “Alberta’s Call” ad campaign, touting Alberta’s booming job market, Canada’s highest average wages, single-family home costs in Edmonton and Calgary a third of those in Vancouver or Toronto, and shorter commutes.
But job recruiter Henry Goldbeck said he’s finding it hard to fill jobs in Alberta.
“It’s more common for us to move people from Alberta to BC,” Goldbeck said. If you were recruiting for similar positions in both provinces, “it’s going to be more difficult to recruit from outside of Alberta.”
“I’m sure there are cases now, with this ad, where people are going to look at housing costs and say, ‘Wow, that makes sense to me and I’m going to do that.'” Goldbeck said. But, he added, when his company is recruiting, those cost-of-living factors “are usually secondary.”
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Even if the campaign is appealing to some, Alberta has land to make up for BC, which has been the net beneficiary of migration between the two provinces since 2014, when 5,704 more Albertans moved to BC than BC residents moved to the other hand, according to Statistics Canada. In 2021, BC was Canada’s top province for interprovincial migration, with 15,856 more people moving from Alberta to BC than from BC to Alberta.
But the assumption is that retirees make up a large share of people moving west, said demographer and planner Andy Yan, director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University. That could have implications for BC if it’s people in their 20s or 30s moving to Alberta.
But a sizable number of young Albertans are leaving, the Calgary-based Canada West Foundation found in its March report. work to live. That report counted an average of 1,133 Albertans between the ages of 25 and 29 who left the province at the same time its overall population was aging.
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“It’s a game changer,” said Stephany Laverty, an analyst at the Canada West Foundation, who co-authored the report. “We don’t know how long that change will last, we’ll have to see how it plays out.”
In surveys and focus groups conducted for the report, Laverty said they found that young Albertans left for economic reasons, with “the perception that Alberta is dominated by oil and gas and if you want to work in other sectors, you have to to go”. elsewhere.”
However, they also moved for quality-of-life reasons, Laverty said, seeking a sense of place and locations with walkable communities.
“I think what young people are looking for has changed, it’s not just finances,” Laverty said.
And with job markets booming in both provinces, Alberta could have a tougher sell unseating many British Columbians who already have good jobs where they are, said Bryan Yu, chief economist at Central 1 Credit Union.
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“In all provinces now, what we see is that many areas are still struggling to find enough labor,” Yu said. “Whether it’s BC, where our unemployment rate is around 4.7 percent and Alberta’s numbers, again, sit at around 4.8 percent.”
Still, Alberta’s ad proposition could be attractive, particularly to younger homebuyers who have been priced out by Vancouver or Toronto prices.
Demographer Yan said that provinces essentially have three key strategies to attract interprovincial migration, which he characterized as “hunting, fishing and farming.”
The hunt is to attract companies to settle in your province. Fishing is building services that attract people to move to your province. Agriculture is the stage where these people put down roots and form families.
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“It looks like, in this case, they are fishing and hunting a little bit for our population,” Yan said of the Alberta ad campaign.
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