The lure of the golden west
CanWest Mediaworks has published an advertorial magazine that extols the virtues of the job-rich (or is that worker-poor?) western Canada, trying to lure Atlantic Canadians to move on out. A story on CBC.ca says that Move West, a 52-page insert in CanWest newspapers, contains ads for jobs ranging from oil patch engineer to coffee pourer, and stories about easterners who have moved west.Atlantic Canada is the target because that's where the unemployment is, said Kim Peters, with CanWest Mediaworks.
Nova Scotia Premier Rodney MacDonald told reporters Wednesday he's not bothered; his focus is on bringing Nova Scotians home again, but he admitted the province needs to publicize its efforts."Part of that is to emphasize to them what jobs are here now in information technology and other types of job opportunities," he said.
(Photo by Jean Laroche/CBC)
In a later story in the Halifax Chronicle Herald, John Morgan, the mayor of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, was highly critical of inaction by various levels of government, including MacDonald's, saying a bad situation is being made worse. ""They say the unemployment rate is declining and in some twisted sort of way that’s true, because people are leaving by the busload for Fort McMurray." (The story noted that, in the five years from 1996 to 2001, the population of Cape Breton declined by 7.6% or 8,765 people.)
The same Chronicle Herald story says that Move West was inserted in nine Transcontinental-owned newspapers in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador, and three Irving-owned papers in New Brunswick.
The magazine included advertising features promoting Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan and was full of ads from employers, ranging from the B.C. Health Department and oil company ConocoPhillips Canada to retail giant Wal-Mart. Move West is a publication of working.com, a national job website launched by CanWest MediaWorks.
Kim Peters, general manager of working.com, said the need for workers goes beyond the oil and gas industry to support services such as construction, hotel staff and real estate.
"It’s like a matchmaking service, really, where we’re trying to connect people — either employers that have jobs or job seekers who might want employers," Ms. Peters said from Toronto.
She said another Move West is planned for February or March.
posted by D. B. Scott at
10:45 pm
1 Comments:
I received one of those magazines in my Cape Breton Post (owned by Transcon). Nice looking piece, although it does have a whiff of the "vultures circling" about it. But it's no worse than the classified pages of The Post, which lately have received a significant boost in help wanted display ads from Alberta and Ontario employers. What was really interesting was that in a 50-page piece on "the west," Manitoba got exactly one-half page: a quarter-page ad and a quarter-page advertorial piece extolling the fact that Manitoba's economy is expected to be robust for the next few years thanks to public works projects. It was placed on the last page, almost as an afterthought. Poor Manitoba: stuck in the middle, neither east nor west. So I guess CanWest, with HQ in Winnipeg, is in the best position to play jobs broker between regions. Another sign of the times.
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