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Employment ads to target Easterners who want to stay home
By MICHAEL TUTTON The Canadian Press

An Alberta surveying firm hungry to hire talented Maritimers has devised a novel lure: set up an office in Nova Scotia that will allow young workers to stay and work near their hometowns.

In a departure from the familiar story of Easterners forced to head West, Crape Geomatics Corp. of Calgary is about to announce it’s coming to Halifax, where it will hire 75 people over the next five years.

The Canadian Press learned details of the announcement over the weekend.

Provincial officials, smarting from the recent publication of a "Move West" magazine — which urges talent from Atlantic Canada to move to Alberta — are expected to trumpet the arrival of Crape Geomatics as a sign that youth needn’t always leave for work.

However, the province will have to provide $853,300 to the geomatics firm in a period of up to five years to bring it here. In return, the company must first create the jobs, which offer salaries starting at $53,000.

The company is expected to use the employees to analyze the digital data provided from the company’s various locations, and generate a variety of maps, municipal plans, pipeline plans and agriculture plans with computer-aided technology.

Colleges in the Maritimes have been pumping out students with sophisticated geomatics training for decades, but the graduates from centres such as the Lawrencetown-based Centre of Geographic Sciences have often been pulled west.

The provincial government is poised to market the arrival of Crape and its high-tech jobs as an alternative model.

According to one source, an advertisement is set to run in Western media with a Crape executive suggesting other firms follow its lead to solve labour shortages by moving operations to the East, where wages are lower and employees are eager to stay.

"Why is this guy smiling?" the ad is expected to read. "Because he’s found a cost-effective talent solution in Nova Scotia."

The success of such a drive will face an uphill battle, as out-migration to Alberta is rising rapidly.

The red-hot Alberta economy continues to draw job seekers from around the country. Statistics Canada reported last week that Ontario alone lost 6,600 people to Alberta in the second quarter of the year, taking the total net outflow to 25,300 in the past 12 months. That’s more than double the average annual migration since 2000.

In New Brunswick, the topic of out-migration has been discussed in the leadup to Monday’s provincial election. In P.E.I., legislature committee hearings have heard from politicians alarmed the Island is losing its brightest youth.

Government officials in Nova Scotia say they want to find ways to keep technology in the region.

Much of the data that Crape handles will flow from global positioning system devices mounted on helicopters flying over sites such as Alberta oil well sites and pipelines.

The airborne surveyors can measure the time it takes pulses of laser light to rebound from the earth’s surface, and are creating increasingly refined, three-dimensional maps of the earth’s surface.

"This is incredibly valuable for exploration and terrain analysis in Alberta exploration," said a source close to the project.

"It kicks out data that can be read and analyzed just as easily from here as it can be from the Bow River."

Brooke Taylor, the province’s minister of Agriculture; Economic Development Minister Richard Hurlburt; and Jamie Hume, president of Crape Geomatics, are expected to formally make the announcement this morning.

The payroll rebate that Nova Scotia Business Inc. provides is given in stages as the company reaches its job targets.

The company is saying the new office in the East will also be used to provide mapping of ocean areas, and to build a client base in the eastern U.S.

Crape Geomatics is privately held, and has been providing "digital images of the physical world" to business and industry clients since 1993.