“One of them moved away, and two of them don’t want to be in this industry anymore,” said bar owner Blaine Armstrong (Blaine Armstrong).

“Learning to perform cocktails and performing services takes a lot of time. Therefore, training requires a lot of money, and interviewing potential candidates requires a lot of money.”

As Alberta hopes to further remove public health restrictions in the next few weeks, Armstrong hopes to add 6 employees to his 10-person team to prepare for full opening and re-host live music performances. The province entered the second phase of a three-phase reopening plan on Thursday, with the goal of removing almost all restrictions by the end of June or early July.

“In terms of requirements and customer experience, this is a shocking change,” Armstrong said. “We are working hard to solve this problem.”

As COVID-related restrictions are relaxed across the country – Ontario’s terrace reopensFor example, in the first step of its reopening plan-companies hope that customers can return, thereby stimulating summer recruitment and employment surge.

Although people are optimistic that the good days will not be so far away, not everyone is sure that a wave of employment is about to sweep the Canadian economy.

Concerns about future restrictions and the direction of the pandemic remain lingering, making some people more cautious about hiring trends in the coming months.

Doug Porter, chief economist at BMO Financial Group, said: “I believe we will see spending boomerangs.” “But I doubt whether we will see this boomerang in employment.”

Interviewed by CBC News after the release last week Employment in May, Porter said there are several factors that explain why he is so cautious.

One is that there are still lingering restrictions in many areas of Canada, which makes him believe that summer employment will not rebound quickly.

He said: “We have reached such a stage, in a normal summer, many college students have been hired and started to work.”

Looking south toward the United States, Porter also pointed out that even if the U.S. economy is very open, it is difficult for employers to find workers. “I think this will also be a problem in Canada,” he said.

In the U.S., people have Do not want to come back Working for health issues; the government has also introduced higher unemployment benefits, and many Americans have childcare issues.

“In general, I think we will see some of the same problems that the United States is experiencing now, but it may not be that serious,” Porter said.

He believes that the Canadian economy will grow by 6% this year, reversing last year’s losses to a large extent. “But a lot of power will be in the second half [of the year].”

As with most of last year, companies find themselves in uncharted territory and have different views on how things will develop.

Some people have a more optimistic view of the direction of things.

National Bank of Canada economists Kyle Dahms and Alexandra Ducharme wrote earlier this month: “With the gradual relaxation of restrictions in June, vaccination targets Far exceeding expectations, the floodgates may open as students and holiday workers rush back to work.”

“We expect the industries most affected by the pandemic to rebound strongly in the summer. Therefore, the recent weakness should be temporary, and the reopening of the economy should support hiring in the coming months.”

Before the comment, there was news that the Canadian labor market actually 68,000 layoffs Last month, as stricter public health restrictions continued or were implemented in many areas of the country, to slow the third wave of the epidemic.

Across the country, companies are struggling to plan for when things will open—while paying close attention to the path of the pandemic.

Many non-essential retailers who managed to deal with the economic impact of COVID-19 did so with the help of online sales. Now they are facing the challenge of re-emergence in physical stores.

“Our team is now busy planning for multiple scenarios,” said Ian Rosen, executive vice president of digital and strategy at luxury menswear retailer Harry Rosen.

“Depending on the lifting of lockdown restrictions, capacity restrictions and vaccination conditions, the shape of the demand curve will vary from province to province.”

Rosen said the company continues to operate all of its stores by providing curbside pick-up and remote sales, with core employees. The company has 800 full-time and part-time employees in 19 stores and its central office. During the pandemic, the employee retention rate was close to 90%.

“They didn’t sleep and didn’t leave their customers,” Rosen said.

The ability to retain key employees during a pandemic may be critical for many companies, especially if recruitment becomes difficult.

CIBC World Markets deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal (Benjamin Tal) looks at countries that opened up some time ago, such as New Zealand and Australia, to understand what might happen here.

“What we are seeing is, yes, obviously recruitment will happen,” Tal said. “But at the same time, we have seen a significant increase in job vacancies. Basically, employers can’t find people. We must see…In the United States and companies where they open up, employers can’t find people at all.”

Tal expects Canada’s job vacancy rate to rise, especially for low-paying jobs, until the pandemic-related assistance program Start to summarizeHe said that wages are already facing some upward pressure as employers try to attract workers back.

But optimistically, the catering industry will shift from “survival to revival” this summer, said Mark von Scherwitz, vice president of Canadian Catering Group Western Canada.

He predicts that in larger centers, restaurants will be able to attract a large number of food service employees back, especially once businesses can provide more certainty to keep open. But other places may encounter challenges.

He said: “Of course I heard from some members of the smaller communities, in particular, there will actually be some labor shortages, and they don’t have many young people.”

National data for May showed that the unemployment rate among students returning to school in the fall was 23.1%.

This is significantly better than the 40% unemployment rate recorded by returning students in the same month last year, but still higher than the 13.7% recorded in May 2019.

Karl Littler of the Retail Council of Canada said that although “significant progress” has been made in these student rates since last year, they have not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels.

“For those with limited windows, such as summer, they will certainly not return to pre-pandemic levels,” he said. “But the gap is narrowing.“