Green jobs on the rise

By Julie Geffard

While the world is bracing itself to face the consequences of global warming, Quebec’s environmental industry is also getting hot. But this heat is of the good kind: the province is creating more green jobs than ever before.

Marie-Claude Blanchette remembers her first years in the environmental industry as difficult times. After graduating in applied ecology in 1987, the environmental project manager with the city of Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville in Montérégie spent three years looking for a permanent position that kept eluding her. “It was so hard at the time to find a job,” she says. “The population was preoccupied by the environment, but not so the various levels of government.”

In the absence of regulations, public and private organizations had no real incentives to hire environmental workers. So after three years marked by long spells of unemployment – up to nine months a year – and just a handful of contract jobs, she branched out of the environmental sector.

When she came back to it in 2001, everything had changed. Seeing that the environment was now a viable economic sector, and more interested than ever in a career in this field, she enrolled in the Master’s of Environmental Studies program at the University of Sherbooke. She hadn’t even completed the program when she was offered a full-time position at Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville, a small city of 25 000.

The Quebec government had started to care.

In the late nineties, as public awareness of environmental issues was increasing at a prodigious pace, the provincial authorities began elaborating various environmental laws and regulations. As the Waste Management Plan was implemented in 2000 and the Water Policy in 2002, introducing new requirements for private and public organizations, the environmental industry began taking off. ECO Canada, a federal organization making the link between employers and professionals in the environment,

The Gaudreau recycling center in Victoriaville has 250 employees, including sorters, truckers, machine operators and administrative staff. (Photo: Alain Provencal, © Le Québec en images, CCDMD)

conducted a vast study of the country’s environmental industry and labour in 2004. It came up with surprising results. With 30 000 more workers occupying environment-related positions than in 2000, putting the total at 250 000, the number of green jobs had expanded by 14% in those four years. They had grown 60% faster than the country’s total workforce over the same period.

Specialists agree that popular awareness of environmental issues has played a decisive role in the growth of the green economy, not only in pressuring governments into action, but also in creating a demand for green products and services.

The whole industrial cycle behind recycling needs to be staffed. (Photo: Hasemeister)

“People are increasingly worried about climate change,” says Patrick Béron, the director of the Master’s in Environmental Sciences at the Université du Québec à Montréal. “They wonder what’s going to happen.”

Until recently, media coverage of the environment was limited to a handful of issues that came and went – remember acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer? But climate change, a topic that surfaced decades ago, has recently become a daily news item.

And it’s creating new vocations every day.

Jean-François Comeau, the assistant director at the Centre universitaire de formation en environnement of the University of Sherbrooke – the department Blanchette graduated from – also remembers that studying in the field of environmental sciences as late as in the early nineties was anything but a guarantee that a job would be waiting for you at the end.

But today Comeau says the program’s job placement rate goes from 95% to 99% six months after graduation. “Our difficulty is actually to encourage our students to complete the program within the time limit,” Comeau says. Students must complete an internship halfway through the program, and the university must compete with employers who try to lure students away from the classroom by offering them part-time work after the end of their internships.

The university is currently compiling more recent data – the figures above date back three years – but there’s no indication the numbers went down.

With such excellent employment prospects, and because younger generations feel particularly concerned by environmental issues, students are enrolling in the province’s environmental programs in droves. The University of Sherbrooke used to take in between 50 and 60 new students each year. Today, this number has doubled.

While these students might have a much easier time finding a job than before, the complexity of green jobs has also increased exponentially. “Fifteen years ago, the courses [in environmental studies] were mainly associated with hard sciences,” says Comeau. But our comprehension of the planet’s ecology is rapidly changing, expanding and being refined, and solving environmental issues has become a complex science that calls for a wide, diversified range of knowledge.

That forces many green workers to multi-task. As an environmental project manager, Blanchette must deal with issues as varied as pesticides, residential mould, water protection or waste management. As a result, she works with many of the municipal departments of Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville.

“The tasks of a dental hygienist are pretty clear,” Béron says. “But an environmental specialist can cover environmental communications, solid waste management, pollution or environmental education, or all of that.”

Everybody in the field is doing their best to keep up. The centre of environmental sciences of the University of Sherbrooke adds one new course to the curriculum each year, and the professors all sit on various committees to keep in touch with the rapidly changing needs, practices and technologies.

The industry’s structural environment is also adapting fast.

While students now have more job opportunities, finding these jobs can be a difficult task. It’s estimated that 60% of all green jobs can be found in non-environmental industries.

“Nortel, for example, offers environmental positions, and so does Purolator,” says Dominique Dodier, the general director of Enviro-Compétences, a Montreal-based agency that for decades has been serving as a link between environmental workers and organizations that need them. “And it’s unlikely that a graduate in environmental sciences who’s looking for a job in the field will find those names in any list of organizations hiring environmental specialists.”

The agency is now working towards building that list, and the group will also work to promote green jobs in the next two years. “Young people must know that environmental jobs are booming, and that they can offer an exceptional professional context,” Dodier says. “In addition to being paid, these workers help save the world.”

Or at least, she adds, they help make it better.

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