Canada’s oilpatch could be nearing a construction boom, but there’s a problem: Who will build it?

Mike Kerr, a Red Seal electrician in Calgary, says he left a job wiring homes a few years ago to take on a more lucrative role in the energy sector. His former employer and friends have been calling him ever since, asking him to come back.

“People aren’t leaving me alone,” he said. “I’d say there’s a shortage of workers like me.”

Western Canada’s energy sector is heading into what analysts are calling its biggest building boom in a generation with a labour market that looks balanced today, but may not stay that way if Ottawa’s investment ambitions are realized.

Two projects alone — a proposed West Coast oil pipeline, dubbed Pacific Link, and a carbon capture system known as Pathways — would increase nationwide employment by up to 90,000 people over the period of 2028 to 2036, according to the Alberta bank ATB Financial.

Kerr left his traditional electrician role a few years ago for a job planning seismic survey routes for energy companies that use sound waves to map underground oil and gas reservoirs.

His old residential employer raises wages every year to keep up, he said, but $45 an hour can’t compete with the energy sector’s industrial work. Or with his work in seismic.

On Kerr’s crew, even workers without a Red Seal ticket who bring their own truck and quad collect close to $600 a day in pay, including equipment fees, meal allowances and a paid-for hotel room.

“And all we do is rip around in quads planting pin flags,” Kerr said. “It’s pretty sweet.”

Demand for skilled trades will likely be on the upswing if governments and private sector partners green-light massive pipeline and carbon capture and mega-projects, which would cost tens of billions of dollars.

These and other major construction projects, including an approved expansion at LNG Canada’s liquefied natural gas shipping terminal on the B.C. coast, are likely going to add strain to an already tight workforce of welders, pipe-fitters and electricians.

In contrast, analysts say Canada should have enough geologists and engineers required to find and develop the oil and gas needed for these projects — for now, at least.

“The balanced unemployment rate in the energy industry suggests we should see stable costs, while at the same time, have enough (workforce) capacity to allow for growth,” Jeremy McCrea, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, wrote in a note to clients.

Data from Careers in Energy, a Calgary-based non-profit labour market organization, shows unemployment across Canada’s exploration and production roles, such as geologists and engineers, held steady at about three per cent through the summer.

“We are in a bit of a goldilocks zone here where we are not seeing excess wage and operating inflation but at the same time, we have enough capacity to continue to hire and grow,” said McCrea in an interview.

The same, however, can’t be said about the roles required to build the energy sector’s underlying infrastructure.

Mark Parsons, chief economist at ATB Financial, said in an interview that finding qualified workers for that type of work now ranks alongside trade wars, inflation and the durability of the AI boom among the risks that worry him most.

“Finding workers is a good problem to have after a decade-long investment drought, but it’s still a problem to be solved,” Parsons said in an interview.

He said the open question is where Canada will find the people to “build, baby, build.”

Job vacancy rates are already significantly higher in specialty trades than in other industries,” he said. “That means we’re going into this build boom with an existing supply crunch.”

Kerr said some of the job offers he gets are for industrial oil and gas work he has never done.

“I’d be as useless as a first-year apprentice, but I’d be paid like a Red Seal,” Kerr said. “It’s pretty rare that an industry is so desperate it will pay big bucks to a Red Seal like me who has zero experience.”

Kerr said he passed on a job at the Woodfibre LNG construction site on the B.C. coast, where he had heard from a friend that electricians earn $60 to $70 an hour with overtime.

Woodfibre’s LNG plant in Squamish, B.C., on July 16, 2026.He turned the opportunity down because he said he was burned out after a cold winter spent near Bonnyville, Alta. “And I’ve seen how those big LNG jobs end.”

“These things get momentum; it’s hire, hire, hire, and then they all end,” Kerr said. “Then you’re laid off.”

To Kerr, that’s an inherent problem with the skilled trades industry.

“Lose an industrial job and you could be out of work for years,” he said. “You gotta sell the toys. Maybe your wife leaves you. You get used to the lifestyle, then the rug gets pulled out from under you.”

Kerr believes that cycle is why the shortage persists. It takes four years to train an electrician, and apprenticeships don’t often line up with a project’s construction schedule.

Parsons said there’s been a promising uptick in Red Seal registrations, “but we haven’t seen a corresponding increase in certificates,” he said, pointing to chronically low apprenticeship completion rates.

Still, in the near term he expects major projects to fill jobs by enticing tradespeople who are already employed with higher pay.

It means workers should have freedom to move between provinces, where different licensing bodies have long slowed credential recognition.

“When we built the oilsands, workers came from Atlantic Canada, B.C., Saskatchewan and across the country,” Parsons said. “We will need the ability to quickly bring in workers from the rest of the country.”

Longer term, he said the priority is steering young people into the trades, including women and Indigenous workers, who remain under-represented.

“There’s a skills mismatch right now. Jobs are available but not filled,” he said. “Lots of people are looking for work who don’t have those skills.”

To Kerr, however, even higher pay isn’t always enough to hold people.

“It’s one thing for government to try and lure people into the trades. Maybe they offer some sort of financial incentive. Maybe it’s an ad on T.V. romanticizing the work. But when you have to work in thirty below weather and wire a house, or fit a pipe without gloves on, the romance goes away pretty quick,” he said.

Parsons said the worst case is that early projects go ahead but later ones stall. Past oilsands booms brought labour shortages and rapid cost inflation, and while the industry learned from the experience, he doesn’t expect the next phase of growth to be painless.

“It’s difficult to imagine it all goes smoothly,” he said.

Proposed crude oil pipeline projects, including the Pacific Link to the B.C. coast, would add close to three million barrels a day of new capacity through 2035. Pacific Link alone accounts for one of those three million.

It’s enough to increase export levels by 50 per cent — the most significant expansion of Western Canada’s crude export capacity since a comparable wave roughly two decades ago.

“If realized in full, this would constitute a material step change in export capacity, with implications that are likely to be broad and long-lasting for the sector,” wrote a team of analysts led by Jamie Kubik at CIBC Capital Markets in a September report.

McCrea said the nature of work this time around would not be the same as past booms.

Producers have cut costs and leaned on technology to do more with fewer people, from automated drilling rigs that need smaller crews to software that has reshaped roles once filled by geologists and engineers.

“The number of people employed in industry has come down a bit,” McCrea said. “The sector has had to be more resilient compared to the past when it comes to cost-cutting and being more efficient with head counts.”

But there is at least one thing the skilled trades and office workers have in common: the need to go where the work is.

In Atlantic Canada, the unemployment rate for exploration and production roles was close to 20 per cent in August, compared with about two per cent in Alberta, according to data from Careers in Energy.

“It’s a stark difference, which suggests we will probably see some inflows like we saw in the past where people from (Eastern Canada) will look to move to Alberta for work,” McCrea said.

Still, all of it hinges on whether the large-scale energy sector infrastructure projects get built.

Prime Minister Mark Carney hosted an investment summit last month aimed at catalyzing a trillion dollars in new spending, while Ottawa has begun rolling out immediate capital write-offs and a fast-tracked regulatory review process.

A consortium that owns LNG Canada approved a major expansion at the B.C. shipping terminal that would double its capacity to ship liquefied natural gas to overseas customers. And the Pacific Link pipeline is now designated as being in the national interest.

Nonetheless, shovels have yet to hit the ground.

“Investors will need to be convinced that Canada can execute with much more efficiency than in the past before the investment needle really moves close to federal aspirations,” Parsons said.

But if all the shovels do hit the ground, the CIBC team of analysts believe the impact will go far beyond pipelines.

They predict a chain reaction across the entire energy industry, boosting oilsands growth, diluent demand, condensate-rich drilling, natural gas supply, and midstream infrastructure.

Meanwhile in Calgary, Kerr is busy preparing for the winter ahead.

“I’ll be leaving up north any day now. I’ll miss the city, the pubs,” he said. “But a man’s gotta make his bread, you know?”

• Email: jarose@postmedia.com