Cast your mind back to 2012 or so.  The Conservative Party was in its sixth year of office, but just getting into the swing of a real majority.  The craziest thing we had to worry about in American politics was a 6-day outbreak of Santorum-mania.  Gagnam was in style.   And the one phrase on everyone’s lips was “skills shortage”.

Under the Tories, “skills” was code for “trades” (as opposed to now under the Liberals when “skills” is code for “coding”).  “We need more welders,” went the refrain, “not more sociology grads working at Starbucks”.  More colleges and trades!  Less universities!  And on and on.  This beating of the drum for skilled trades lasted for most of the Conservative government’s term and is the reason we have so many weird micro-incentives for apprenticeships.  Because according to that government, those were the skills “in shortage”.

Now, skills shortages are weird things.  They are said to exist when the price of specific types of labour starts to rise significantly relative to other goods.  This is not a definition of a “shortage” which applies to any other good of course.  When the price of gas goes up on holiday weekends, we talk about the interplay of supply and demand, not “gas shortages”.  When the price of cherries goes up after mid-August, we do not talk about cherry shortages.  But when the truckers or electricians’ wages go up?  Skills shortage!

The problem was that the government’s own system of occupational projections (known as COPS, or the Canadian Occupational Projection System) never indicated that skilled trades were actually in shortage.  Instead, their 2011-2020 projection said that the five areas in most critical shortage were nurses, doctors/dentists, managers in health and education, human resources and business services, and managers (not tradespeople) in the natural resources sector.  The 2013-2022 projection still showed nurses and doctors/dentists as being the major categories in shortage, as well as Opticians, Aerospace Engineers, Industrial Electricians, Management Consultants, Contractors and Supervisors for Heavy Construction Crews, and – hilariously – University Professors (the COPS model has trouble with public sector occupations where employment has less to do with demand and more to do with willingness of governments to subsidize things).

So where are we on skills shortages now?  Let’s check out the 2017-2026 projections out earlier this year from ESDC.  As usual, the vast majority of occupations are in balance – that is, the number of people qualified for those positions are adequate to meet the demand.  However:

• 17 occupations are considered to be currently in shortage: 14 of these are science/health occupations (10 requiring university credentials, 4 requiring college), plus Psychologists (considered “community services” rather than health), Graphic Designers and Interior Designers
• 14 occupations are expected in to be in shortage over the next decade 12 of which are in science/health (mostly the latter, 9 of which require university degrees), plus Psychologists again and – amusingly, given all the self-driving car hype of the past five years – truck drivers.
• 6 occupations are in persistent shortage – that is, both currently in shortage and expected to remain so for the next decade.  That includes 5 health disciplines: Registered Nurses, Specialist Physicians, Family Physicians, Speech Pathologists, Physiotherapists and Psychology.  All of these require university education.
• Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation, there are just four occupations which are both currently oversupplied and expected to remain so: Glaziers and Insulators, “Other Workers in Fishing, Trapping and Hunting Occupations”, Tourism/Amusement Services Occupations (apparently Statscan doesn’t have much faith in the Canadian tourism sector) and – this one is particularly hilarious given the hysteria of the early ‘10s – Steamfitters and Pipefitters.

Remarkably, given the anxiety about skills shortages earlier in the decade, no one seems to be lining up to demand investment in healthcare education.  No one in the federal or provincial governments is saying we need “more health BScs, fewer unemployed steamfitters”.

I wonder why that is.  But what do you bet it has something to do with the fact that nearly all of occupations in persistent demand are majority-female in their composition while the inverse is true of skilled trades?

Tomorrow: why the skills debate still matters