Expected demographic shifts caused by rapid aging of Canada’s population is likely to lead to labor scarcity in sectors and occupations across all skill levels; therefore, Canada needs to start building a robust labor market to prepare for the consequences.
At LaMP, we seek to address the growing worker scarcity by improving occupational migration programs, creating opportunities for workers and solving problems for employers. We have been working at both the federal and provincial level to identify opportunities to address Canada’s worker shortages in essential sectors, such as aged care, construction and hospitality.
In 2021, we published a high-level policy proposal on designing a pathway that would allow new workers in certain trade and service occupations recognized as essential to come to Canada from abroad, a change for the Canada’s current model favoring “high-skilled” workers.
Since then, we have been working with partners at provincial as well as federal levels on designing “development-centric” regional pilot for essential workers from historically-excluded sending communities, to demonstrate poverty alleviation potential and economic benefits of admitting migrant workers without a bachelor’s degree to individual provinces and Canada as a whole.
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