How super-commuting can help fill mining’s labour gap

Canada is poised for a mining boom. But one thing is still missing: labour. 

For a decade in the early 2000s, I worked with several mining companies to staff up projects across Canada. From Detour Lake in Ontario to Jansen Lake and Belle Plaine in Saskatchewan, I know what it takes to not only find labourers, but to attract and retain the best skilled tradespeople in the country to your project: concierge support to secure housing and transportation. 

The competition in Canada is already fierce. According to the Mining Association of Canada, Canada’s mining operations employed over 700,000 people directly and indirectly in 2021. But for years, Canada’s mining industry hasn’t been able to fill jobs, with more than two-thirds of mining companies in Ontario alone reporting significant difficulty hiring skilled labour. 

Pressure is mounting to begin mining other critical minerals in Ontario’s Ring of Fire and other resource-rich areas of the country. But to get the Ring of Fire developed, we don’t just need to get moving on road and other infrastructure construction, we need innovative solutions to secure the workforce. Canada has a lot of the skilled workers trained up and ready to meet the growing demands, they just aren’t in the right places. Skilled workers who lose their jobs in one part of the country must be connected to work opportunities in another region that matched their unique abilities and offered supports to secure housing and transportation to get them there. 

Forecasts in Canada’s first Critical Minerals Strategy suggest that up to 113,000 new workers will be needed by 2030 to meet the growth in demand and to replace workers anticipated to retire or exit the mining workforce. The Strategy, released in December 2022, is a roadmap to making Canada a global supplier of choice for critical minerals. It includes a significant focus on the need to help employers train and re-skill people, and to help the workforce grow and meet the demand driven by critical minerals. 

Canada has also committed to continue supporting efforts to attract, train and retain women, with an aspirational target of achieving 30% female participation in the mining workforce by 2030. It is an ambitious target, but I know from experience that it can be done. By offering super-commuting and concierge services to skilled workers including housing and transportation, we have placed women in skilled construction jobs at twice the national average. By applying these same strategies to mining, we can help industry meet those diversity targets. 

The industry is very familiar with the process of bringing in skilled labourers from another region for several weeks at a time on rotation. We learned how to recruit labourers from every corner of the country to meet the demands of the oilsands. What we have learned in the decades since then is the importance of supporting workers with access to housing and transportation to make taking the leap to super-commute across the country for work less daunting. It also results in a higher rate of workers choosing to relocate permanently, building a more sustainable and reliable workforce. 

Our research shows that as many as 32% of unemployed Canadians are willing to super-commute or move to another province for work. But the conditions must be right. They need housing and transportation, and to be able to see themselves as part of the community. 

To get critical minerals projects built across Canada and leverage the boom that is just on the horizon, we need to do more to incentivize Canadians to move within the country to fill labour shortages. Organizations like ours are filling in the gaps, helping to match skilled workers to jobs where labour shortages prevent growth, and securing housing and transportation to get them there. 

Todd Clyde is the CEO of Blue Branch, which helps oil & gas and mining companies staff their operations.