5,000 ‘quality’ jobs for Filipinos in Canada -- Brion

INQUIRER.net
Posted date: January 06, 2007

Some 5,000 “quality” jobs in the oil and gas industry in oil-rich central and western Canadian provinces will become available to highly skilled Filipinos this year, Labor Secretary Arturo Brion said Saturday.

He said this new market for Philippine labor comes after the two countries forged the memorandum of understanding “Cooperation in the Fields of Labor, Employment, and Human Resource Development” to affirm the preference for overseas Filipino workers.

Brion, who signed the MOU with Pat Atkinson, Minister of Advanced Education and Employment of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, said the accord affirms the preference for OFWs in the Canadian labor market.

Philippine labor attache to Toronto, lawyer Francisco Luna, said the MOU would open “better paying, safer, quality job opportunities in Canada” for undocumented truck drivers in Iraq and oil and gas workers in other parts of the Middle East.

Luna said Canada’s labor demand also includes services, including higher paying fast-food type jobs. “Normally, these job types pay 6 to 7 dollars per hour, but here, they pay as high as 12 to 15 dollars,” he said.

Brion noted that Canada, the world’s second largest country in area, accounts for an increasing volume of remittances from major OFW host economies. He cited Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas figures indicating that total OFW remittances from Canada surpassed $117.061 million in 2005, representing a growth of 73.8 percent from $67.338 million in 2004.

Saskatchewan is one of the provinces comprising the vast central and western area of Canada, which includes Manitoba, British Columbia, Alberta, and other territories.