If you love them, let them go (?)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about workforce retention. Specifically focused on newcomers but, in general, how much should we be fussed about keeping people in our communities.
Someone at UNB once told me there were slightly more engineering graduates living outside the province than those living in the province. I think he was basing this on a very long term trend.
A pessimist would say we enrolled too many, it was costly to the taxpayer and we should have throttled back the number to something like in-province demand.
I have a different view. That surplus of talent led to the development of an engineering cluster mostly centered in Fredericton that generated $170 million in export revenue in 2021. That is money that comes into New Brunswick and gets translated into wages, consumer spending and taxes. Between 2010 and 2021, the province exported $1.73 billion worth of architectural, engineering and related services. The provincial government taxes on that were likely in the range of $350 million.
The other thing, though, about the table is that we had almost no growth in export revenue while many other provinces surged ahead.
Adjusted for population size, New Brunswick had the second highest enrolment of engineering-related students among the 10 provinces in 1992. There were nearly 2,100 enrolled. In 1992, New Brunswick universities had more students enrolled in architecture, engineering and related technologies programs in total than Nova Scotia. As of 2021/2022, Nova Scotia universities had 194 enrolled per 100 in New Brunswick. Overall, there were 1,670 enrolled. Relative to the national enrolment, New Brunswick universities dropped by two-thirds over that period.
In 2021/2022, New Brunswick universities ranked 8th among the 10 provinces for enrolment in architecture, engineering and related technologies programs.
The good news is that enrolment in engineering programs, I believe, is on the rise since 2021/2022 (the most current data from Stats Can).
Should we have pumped out ‘surplus’ engineering grads in 1992? Should we have let our share of the national talent pipeline drop by two-thirds over a 30 year period? Did Newfoundland tripling enrollment influence it becoming the top province for exports per capita?
At the very least, I think we can conclude that a surplus talent pool is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition to grow export-focused industries.
If this is true, we should be deliberately over-graduating in areas where there is potential to develop export opportunities (this ranges from mining to tourism).
I recently also looked at the mobility of trades-related workers between provinces using Census data. As you see in the chart below there is a lot of interprovincial mobility among trades-related workers. New Brunswick faired comparatively well between 2016 and 2021 as only 3.7% of those working in NB in 2016 were employed elsewhere in 2021, but for just a five year period this is quite a mobile workforce.
If you do the same ‘talent pipeline’ analysis, New Brunswick also saw a relative decline in students in these occupations in the past 20 years. Again, should we fill up our schools with domestic and international students? Or just hope for the best?
It’s almost like, consciously or unconsciously, New Brunswick was scaling back everything in anticipation of a long period of decline. We maybe didn’t realize the constriction of the talent pipeline might actually accelerate decline.
Coming full circle to the point of this post. I believe that easy labour mobility is a feature, not a bug, of the Canadian economy. It leads to a more flexible workforce. It helps keep wages up as if they drop too low even in a low cost of living place people will move. It should lead to employers focusing on the quality of the workplace as they don’t want to lose staff and it could even lead communities to focus on being great places to live as they do not want an exodus of people.
In other words, if no one was moving from community to community or province to province what would be the incentive to work on being a great place to live?
We should try and encourage people retention by better alignment of skills/jobs, creating welcoming communities and helping people put down deep roots. We should expose young people to career paths here including entrepreneurship.
There is always going to be migration. People move out for a wide variety of reasons from not liking the place to being dragged away kicking and screaming. If you look at the data, the outward flow is now well below the 1970s and 1980s.
If you look just at the kids, and adjust for the declining population in that age group, again the share of 15-24 years olds goin’ down the road has been declining.
All of these numbers, by the way, include immigrant mobility between provinces. We can only separate immigrants out using other sources that are more lagged.
Long post. Simple message. If we have lots of talent -similar to if we have lots of capital laying around - that becomes the feedstock for economic growth. If we throttle the talent pipeline (PSE, immigrants, international workers, etc.) just like if we throttled access to capital, we will throttle our economic potential.