Young Canadians Moving West For Resource Jobs

[Anonymous]

Good editorial today in the Edmonton Sun. Young Canadians are voting yes with their feet to Alberta's oilsands, Saskatchewan's conventional oil and BC's mines and natural gas. Too fucking bad for those foreign-funded anti-Canadian assholes who prefer foreign resources over our own.

Add them up, and young Canadians who have gone West in the last decade would fill out a good-sized Canadian city by themselves.



At more than 70,000, that's enough millennials to form Manitoba or Saskachewan's third-largest city.



In Alberta, they'd top Medicine Hat as the fifth-largest city.



The dramatic westward shift of youth is laid out in a new Fraser Institute study of the migration patterns of young Canadians from 2003 to 2012.



Not surprisingly, it finds the resource-stoked West -- with some city jobless rates so low, it's effectively full employment -- is the place to be if you're 25 to 34.



We've seen this in economic roller-coasters of the past. But there are new lessons in what's happening now for Alberta, which has soaked up most of the young talent, and for Ontario, which has bled the most.



Why?



Because the age group now on the move, born after 1980, is like nothing that's come before.



And with baby boomers fast retiring, the millennials weaned on the digital revolution will soon be the largest segment of working Canadians. Where they go now, and what they do, will have a big say in who benefits most.



Ontario has done little but mortgage its future, doubling its debt to nearly $300 billion over the past decade while running jobless rates that have trailed the national average for nearly eight years.



Yes, it has spent a king's ransom on roads and bridges to rebuild its recession-battered economy, especially manufacturing.



But millennials -- call them coddled or savvy -- expect to make a living not with their hands but with their heads. Their infrastructure is the Internet. To many of them, Ontario means only the parents' basement.



Alberta, for all its diversification efforts, big wages and low taxes, remains to many a one-trick energy pony.



That focus may satisfy millennials for awhile, but it won't keep them -- not with their me-focused needs and liberal outlooks, and not in smaller cities where they'll be needed -- once they whip their personal red ink.



This is not our parents' economy; there's no reason to expect adult kids to think so, either.

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