Lifeguards work at Brittany Beach in Ottawa on June 24, 2022. Cities across Canada are facing a shortage of lifeguards as the city’s swimming pools and beaches open during the summer. Sean Kilpatrick / The Canadian Press
Cities across Canada are struggling to find enough lifeguards to keep their pools and beaches open, as the national organization that certifies lifeguards urges employers to raise wages and cover training costs to further encourage people to do work.
Howie Dayton, Toronto’s community recreation director, said the city needs an additional 250 lifeguards to fully equip its aquatic programs in the pools and outdoors. One of its 10 beaches will be completely unmanned this summer due to shortages, and two will only be monitored on weekends, he added. The city announced Tuesday that it would cancel 169 swimming lessons this summer, which will affect more than 1,100 students.
“The biggest challenge is that during COVID, for two years, we were unable to operate the courses, which are critical to getting young swimmers certified, trained and prepared to fill these positions.” said Mr. Dayton. Existing lifeguards were unable to receive certification.
“It’s not a night course … it will take time to rebuild that workforce,” Mr. Dayton.
The city of Calgary said in a statement that it offers less than half the number of swimming lessons it would do in a normal year and that it reduces the hours of swimming facilities as it struggles with a high rate of wear and tear among lifeguards and others staff members. The statement says the city has only 65 percent of the staff it would normally need to run its water program.
And the Vancouver City Parks Department he said in a statement that he only has 60 percent of the lifeguards he would normally hire for the summer season.
Barbara Byers, president of the Lifesaving Society, which trains and accredits lifeguards across Canada, said three years of the pandemic have created a deadlock in the training system and that there is a shortage not only of new lifeguards, but also of instructors who teach lifeguards.
Ms Byers said another problem for lifeguards is that jobs are not as popular with young people as they used to be. Salaries because positions have stagnated, and summer workers can often find a comparable wage in jobs that do not require training, given the labor shortage many companies now face.
The employment participation rate among teenagers is slowly recovering after falling to just 43.9% in 2020, and some jobs that previously paid the minimum wage now offer better compensation to attract workers.
“The challenge is that a lifeguard’s pay is not that different from the minimum wage,” Ms. Byers said. He noted that the average pay of a lifeguard, which is between $ 20 and $ 25 per hour, does not reflect the high level of training and responsibility they assume.
“We would certainly support municipalities to recognize the skills and training a person must have to be a lifeguard, and give them economic value,” he said.
Lifeguards must complete 100 hours of training, which can cost approximately $ 1,000. Additional training is required to be a swimming instructor.
Ms Byers said she would also encourage employers to remove the financial barrier to becoming a lifeguard by covering part or all of the cost of training.
The city of Vancouver said it is in the final stages of introducing a pilot project that would do so.
But Vancouver said it has no plans to raise wages, as it already pays $ 34 an hour for lifeguards and $ 28 an hour for lifeguard instructors.
In Toronto, Mr. Dayton said the city is in talks with the union representing lifeguards on ways to attract more staff.
Meanwhile, the city is trying to make up for the shortage by making existing staff take more shifts. The next calendar of swimming classes begins in August, and Mr. Dayton said he hopes Toronto can fill its list of lifeguards and avoid further cancellations.
“We believe we are in a much better position in August because it will give us time to certify additional instructors and work with some of our existing instructors to see if they are willing to take additional classes,” he said.
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