Workforce Development
Marine shipping workforce shortages spreading BY LEO RYAN
T
he alarm bells are ringing louder and louder over an increasing manpower shortage in Canada’s marine transportation sector, where some 200,000 Canadians work on ships, in ports and provide marinerelated logistics services. It’s not only the lack of enough superior officers like captains, first mates and chief engineers to meet demands but also entry-level seafarers. It’s a problem that is echoed in the world’s shipping centres from Greece to London to Hong Kong. “Despite the many perks that marine offers – great salaries, interesting and varied work, technology-driven – labour and skills shortages are an acute problem in the marine sector,” says Bruce Burrows, President and CEO of the Chamber of Marine Commerce, whose membership includes shipping lines, shippers, ports and marine suppliers in Canada and the United States. “Many of our members have identified workplace development as their number one challenge.” The Canadian Transportation Act review in 2015 found that Canadian seafarers are aging and the pool of qualified seafarers is diminishing, not just in Canada but throughout the Western world. “The problem has become even more acute, such that Canadian ship operators have had to tie up ships because they cannot crew them and call back Captains and First Mates from
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retirement and leave,” Burrows adds. Labour shortages have also hit public agencies like pilotage authorities and the Canadian Coast Guard with the private and public sectors competing against each other within the same small labour pool. In January, the marine industry joined forces with the federal government to establish the Canadian Marine Industry Foundation (see separate report on page 12), to promote careers in the marine sector and help alleviate labour shortages. The Chamber of Marine Commerce is one of the founding partners. “This is an opportunity to take a more strategic national approach to let Canadians know that marine is a dynamic, modern sector committed to innovation, sustainable best practices and ongoing skills development,” Burrows explains.
Labour shortages impacting economic growth The overall predicament in Canada was demonstrated in striking fashion last summer shortly after Quebec City’s Groupe Desgagnés held an inauguration ceremony for two leading-edge polar class duel fuel/LNG petroleum-chemical tankers custom-built for the company in Turkey. They represented the completion of an investment plan in excess of $200 million CDN launched in 2015 for four such state-of-the-art vessels. The new generation tanker vessels costing approximately $50 million each are the result of an original concept to optimize safety, environmental performance and operational efficiency as well as to adapt
to navigational conditions in northern Quebec, the Saint-Lawrence and the Great Lakes regions. The fuel system actually makes it possible for those vessels to use either conventional bunker fuel, diesel fuel or liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a fuel. But one of the four state-of-theart-of-the-art vessels, the MT Rossi A. Desgagnés could not begin trading once it arrived in Canada as planned because Groupe Desgagnés was simply unable to find qualified Canadian mariners with required certificate of competencies in sufficient numbers to crew the vessel, in keeping with Transport Canada regulatory requirements. For Groupe Desgagnés, the ripple effect of such an acute crew shortage was financially very costly, with the company operating only three of its four new product tankers simultaneously, as it juggled with available mariners. “We switched to another ship and moved crews from one ship to another for two months,” explained a senior executive. “This had several million dollars of economic impact.” During those two months, the company had no choice but to resort to temporarily importing foreign flagged vessels to deliver oil products to its customers in the St. Lawrence and Arctic regions, a time consuming and costly undertaking.
Reciprocal recognition accords with France and Norway Up until recently, Canadian marine industry interests have not taken advantage of provisions already built-in
