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Peer-Review Record

Dependence on Interprovincial Migrant Labour in Atlantic Canadian Communities: The Role of the Alberta Economy

by Doug Lionais 1,*, Christina Murray 2 and Chloe Donatelli 1
Reviewer 1: Anonymous
Reviewer 2: Anonymous
Reviewer 3: Anonymous
Submission received: 28 June 2019 / Revised: 21 November 2019 / Accepted: 22 December 2019 / Published: 19 January 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Families, Work and Well-being)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

General comments: 

This is an interesting paper on a relatively important topic (at least within Canada).  The analytical techniques are sound, and most of the conclusions are well-supported by the data.  

That said, I have several suggestions for improvement, and list them below: 

1) The author(s) argue that Atlantic workers in Alberta bring home their cheques as remittances.  I agree that this is likely the case, but the data don't actually show where workers spend their money.  It is possible that workers come back empty-handed, because they've spent all their money in Alberta.  I think more care needs to be taken around the discussions of whether Atlantic economies are actually becoming remittance economies.  

2) Figure three lists provinces by acronym, including 'CB', but international readers may not know what these mean.  I woudl spell them out, since Tables and Figures should typically be detailed enough that they can stand alone.  

3) I fear that the paper is missing a convincing hook.  We get really interesting and informative, but the main argument which I think is t hat Atlantic Canada is becoming increasingly dependent on wages from a globally volatile industrial sector, is not fully shown.  The author(s) should spend more time connecting worker flows to commodity prices. Right now, they are connected in the text of the article, but not the tables or figures.  It would be very interesting to see oil prices overlaid on worker flows. 

4) Is reliance on oil more precarious than depending on local job opportunities?  It doesn't seem so, yet that is one of the implications of this article.  This should be expanded upon, because Atlantic governments are split on how they feel about interprovincial employment.    

Author Response

The authors would like to thank the reviewer for their considered comments. 

Softened wording regarding remittance economies. Acronyms changed to full names. Added oil prices to figure 3, highlighted the focus of the paper in the text – that AC is increasingly dependent on a volatile sector. The reviewer suggests that oil and gas is perhaps no more precarious than local job opportunities. While we accept the premise of the critique; our argument is that Atlantic Canadian’s are engaging in mobile work in the oil and gas sector because there are so few job opportunities (precarious or not) in the local region (as demonstrated in figure 1). Becoming mobile is a mechanism to cope with the lack of employment. While we tried to highlight this in the text (starting at line 125), this has been made more clear in the text. We have also introduced this earlier in the text.

Reviewer 2 Report

Please address the comments to improve the value of your paper. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

The authors would like to thank the reviewer for their considered comments. 

Historical trend of labour mobility included in expanded lit review Lit review section updated Policy – Additional discussion on policy implications has been added to the conclusion section.

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of inter-provincial employment between the region of Atlantic Canada and the province of Alberta. In response to evidence of the growing centrality of mobile work to social and economic life in the region, the authors analyze data from the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database, which links individual tax information to employer filed employment information, thereby offering information on workers living in one province while working in another. Looking at data from 2006-2011, the authors present data on the number of inter-provincial workers from the region, their earnings, the percentage of their earnings derived from Alberta employment, their industries of employment, and the impact of their earnings on Atlantic regional and provincial (and, in the case of Cape Breton, sub-provincial economies). The authors illustrate a growing economic reliance in Atlantic Canada on employment in Alberta, arguing that this reliance is particularly strong in more peripheral, economically depressed, and deindustrialized parts of the region—in particular, from the region’s island economies. In discussing the implications of this growing reliance, the authors argue that this regional reliance on Western Canada’s oil and gas industry is inherently precarious: not only is petroleum a boom-bust industry, but the realities of climate change and the contested character of Canadian pipeline politics ensure that the future of this industry is at best uncertain. That is, while inter-provincial employment in Alberta has spread some economic benefits of western oil development to other regional economies, during moments of crisis or contraction, these distant sending economies are often rapidly and disproportionately impacted.

The collection and analysis of this data is a very useful and exciting contribution to the study of labour mobility and interprovincial employment in Canada. As far as I know, this is the first scholarly quantitative account of long-distant employment relations between these two regions. For that reason, the paper, with some changes, could make a strong contribution to this journal. But as it stands, while the paper offers a clear overview of the broad trends, it lacks a broader argument that links this quantitative data to either the region’s specific—yet diverse—socio-economic histories and geographies or the broader phenomenon of long-distance commuting in the global resource sector. Below, I explain three specific and related concerns that speak to this general problem. I also have some more specific comments, which I list below these more major points.

1) Framing in the literature. What is the literature in which the authors wish to embed their research and to which they are contributing? This is not clear. There are references to select studies on inter-provincial employment out of Atlantic Canada and some studies on long-distance commuting from Australia but I think the paper would benefit from more thorough engagement with this specific literature. I also think it would benefit from some engagement with literature on the broader processes (economic change, labour mobility, uneven development, resource economies) in question. There are glimmers of this (e.g. page 4), but it could be much more robust. The authors could do this in a number of ways. The lack of engagement with literature on both this empirical case and the broader processes is especially apparent in the historical section (see page 3) and discussion (see page 13).

2) Engagement with the historical and geographical specificity of the Atlantic region. While I appreciate and value that the authors are offering a regional analysis, I think they bypass some of the Atlantic region’s diversity and complexity, especially in the ways they characterize the region’s widespread economic distress. The authors make reference throughout the article, to the region’s (and sometimes sub-regions’) histories of “deindustrialization,” “disinvestment,” or “depletion,” without always offering a clear explanation of what they mean. Deindustrialization or decline is a framing that clearly applies to areas impacted by the cod moratorium and to Cape Breton, which experienced a more conventional process of deindustrialization. But I am not sure these concepts properly explain the economic reality of the rest of the region, where, by most measures, economies have been depressed for a very long time. In other moments, ‘common sense’ claims about the region are simply not substantiated. For example, on page 13, the authors describe Newfoundland and Labrador as “smaller, peripheral, and more economically depressed” than other parts of the region. Is this true? Measured how? When? Recently NL has higher median household income than other provinces. I can appreciate the challenge that a regional analysis poses for characterizing economic trends in detail, but I think in general that the claims made about this region need to be better supported using the plentiful research and writing about this region. Most importantly, more detailed and empirically grounded engagement with the region might allow the authors to refine the character of this paper’s contribution by, for example, offering a more thorough explanation of the socio-economic factors and histories characterizing the places with the highest mobility.

3) Scale of analysis. While I agree that these trends have more of an impact on more depressed and peripheral parts of the region, I have questions about the geography of the analysis. Why is Cape Breton parsed out while other sub-provincial regions (that, similarly, might be more ‘remote,’ have higher unemployment, and, as a result, higher rates of inter-provincial employment) not analysed similarly? If you parsed out the data for, say, northern New Brunswick or the South Shore of Nova Scotia, would you see a similar trend? Or if you separated St. John’s from Western Newfoundland? And if this is not the case, how much of it has to do with language (Acadian workers are perhaps more likely to seek work in northern Quebec) or accessibility of air travel? As it stands, it almost seems like Cape Breton was separated out by virtue of being an island. On several occasions throughout the article, the authors reference the disproportionate impact of IPE on Atlantic island economies (see page 12), but barring a more detailed account of what’s happening in other sub-provincial regions, this account strikes me as somewhat arbitrary. If indeed these trends hold truer for the three island economies that other disproportionately depressed parts of the region, the authors should draw on the specific realities of these places to explain why this is. But I wonder if analysing the data at a finer scale across the board would allow the authors to draw more specific links between the trends in the data and the (specific and diverse) socio-economic histories and presents of the region. That is, a finer analysis might allow us to better understand the driving factors and behind and realities of this mobility.

Specific comments

There are a number of claims throughout the paper that lack sources. For example: that in Cape Breton, mobile employment in Alberta now equals levels of employment from coal mining and steel making in the 1980s or that mobile workers are among the first to feel the impact of downturns. This is also the case throughout the economic history provided on page 3. On page 4 the authors make mention of the relative mobility of capital vs. labour but, in this story, labour is clearly very mobile. I would be interested to hear how the authors think this case speaks to that political economic theory. The graphs are difficult to read when printed in black and white. I also found Figure 6 to be confusing and would have appreciated a clearer indication of the units being used. Storey & Hall have a 2018 article in The Canadian Geographer called “Dependence at a distance” in which they argue that the western petroleum industry has produced a new sort of single-industry town in parts of Atlantic Canada (specifically the Burin Peninsula) and the vulnerabilities that come with this. The authors might find this paper useful. On page 12, the authors state that while the choice to work in Alberta is an individual one, mobile work has broad economic impacts because it is happening at scale. This scale seems to also indicate that the trend has causes beyond individual decision-making. Related to this, the authors state in this same section that Atlantic governments are not actively shaping the economic inputs from this mobility. But, is not the widespread movement of labour shaped by local economic policy in that this policy-making has failed to ensure employment opportunities at home? These types of details would help draw the link between the data the authors present and the processes behind them. The paragraph on pipeline politics (page 13) offers what strikes me as an overly simple account of this dynamic. Whether the lack of pipeline infrastructure expansion even constitutes a bottleneck is debated and political: some reports have argued that more lines would only be needed if the industry is to continue expanding. I would also suggest that fighting these lines has not simply been the work of climate change activists. Not only have Indigenous nations often been at the centre of these fights, there has also been widespread public opposition to each of these lines. I know this is a minor point in the article (and that the main point here is that projects are being disrupted), but it seems important to critically examine the facts behind both the ‘need’ for these lines and the conflicts that surround them.

 

Author Response

The authors would like to thank the reviewer for their considered comments. We have tried to address each of the suggestions. The points below indicate how we have done so. 

Expanded lit review added Atlantic region – treating the region as homogenous, framed by deindustrialization and decline, is problematic. Region is more diverse. Highlight the specific socio-cultural factor for the areas with highest mobility. We appreciate the reviewer’s comments that the region as a whole should not be treated homogenously. Without getting too lost in sub-regional historical specificities, we have tried to highlight the unevenness of mobile work within the region. We have edited the text to soften our generalizations and highlight more specific contextual factors. Newfoundland and Labrador as peripheral and depressed Focusing on labour markets, while Newfoundland and Labrador did experience a substantial growth in GDP in between 2000 and 2008, labour markets remained poor. The unemployment rate in NL remained significantly above the national level throughout. We have tried to make this clearer in the text.

 

Scale of analysis Agree that having the data at a finer scale would be useful, but at time of writing, this was what was available. Why CB as sub-region. – CB separated due to previous work that identified it as a particular site of mobile work. This selection does not deny that there may be other sub-provincial regions with similar concentrations. Based on previous qualitative research suggesting that mobility was high. It is true that we cannot say that this region is higher than other sub regions (tried to correct this in the text) without comparative analysis. However, the data does still indicate the substantial and (at time of writing) increasing importance of mobile work for sub-region. This reasoning has been added to the section on methods.

 

Specific Comments:

 

Citations included: CB employment and coal mining employment Mobile workers first to feel impact of downturns Economic history (p3) Mobile capital vs immobile labour. Labour made mobile While this is not a focus of this paper, it is an important topic that has been discussed in depth by Mazer. We have cited her work and revised the text to bring more prominence to it. Fix graphs for BW printing - fixed Updated the discussion regarding fig 6 Storey and Hall added to lit review Individual decision-making vs broader social trend We agree with the reviewer that the scale of mobile labour in some source communities suggests that the causes are due to broader social-economic processes rather than individual decision making. Indeed, one of the main take aways from our paper is that mobile labour has occurred at scale in deplted regions of the Atlantic because of these broader social-economic processes. Policy responses and pushes Added comment that a lack of (successful) regional policy to provide job opportunities creates the need for mobility. Pipeline politics p13 The authors agree with the reviewer that pipelines are only a bottleneck for oil sands growth (not current production). While this was stated in our original text, we have edited for further clarity. wording changed to broaden the opposition.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I'm satisfied with these revisions. Thanks to the authors.  

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