Canadian interprovincial employees in the Canadian Arctic: a case study in fly-in/fly-out employment metrics, 2004–2009

Abstract

One of the ongoing debates in Arctic labor research is the impact of the fly-in/fly-out worker populations on northern labor markets. A problem that researchers encounter is the lack of standardized national metrics for tracking migratory employees. However, a long-awaited dataset deriving from Statistics Canada's Alberta Shadow Population research using Canada Revenue Agency information has recently become available, which provides statistics on fly-in/fly-out workers in the Canadian North. This data set provides an overview of Receiving Employees by Canadian province and territory, which gives us our first glimpse at annual counts of the number of fly-in workers being received by each of the Canadian territories for the period 2004–2009. This new information allows us to begin to explore the possible impacts of fly-in workers on northern labor markets in Nunavut, Northwest Territories, and Yukon using comparisons to well-vetted data sets from Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey and other national accounts. The information indicates that the North became more reliant on fly-in workers during the period 2004–2009 and that in Nunavut, while the number of fly-in workers increased annually, so too did unemployment and the number of people not in the labor force.