"It changed my life": Absence of rural social programs felt years after closing

As she watched the white passenger van pull up to her doorstep to take her to the Alberta Job Corps program in Lac La Biche for the first time, Kathy Hayward felt nervous.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” Hayward says.

Job Corps was a work skills training program for people with barriers to employment, designed to transition income support recipients back into the workforce. Unlike comparable education initiatives, participants were hired directly by the program, and earned a wage along with work experience.

Then in her early 50s, Hayward said she and her husband were lost. Directionless. “We were doing drugs, and we were on welfare, and we were just kind of living that lifestyle.”

Though it was only seven years ago, thinking back to who she was then is like looking at a different person, she says.

Hayward rose quickly through the program. When time came to graduate, she was kept on staff as a lead hand. Before long, she was the one piloting the van throughout the Lakelands region to pick up trainees, orientating new hires, and teaching a section on life skills.

“It changed my life,” she said.

“I learned that there’s a different part of me. When you’re in addiction, you’re not living right. And you don’t even know what you have until you get something like [Job Corps] to bring it out,” she said.

“Because I didn’t know that I could teach. I didn’t know that I could stand up in front of a roomful of people and talk to them.”

Hayward’s story is one of thousands. At its peak, about 250 people went through the Job Corps program in Lac La Biche each year, the majority successfully finding employment after completion.

In October 2020, Alberta’s United Conservative government, under the leadership of Jason Kenney, announced the closure of all remaining Job Corps offices along with job cuts that affected hundreds of provincial employees in social services, agriculture, and wildfire management.

The province said at the time it would save approximately $6.9 million by closing Job Corps, money that could be refocused on other programs that “achieved better results.” While alternative social supports may exist in Edmonton or Calgary, when the Job Corps facility shut its doors in Lac La Biche, there was nothing equal to take its place.

“I felt that Job Corps was truly fulfilling a needed service in our community,” said Lac La Biche County Councillor Jason Stedman.

“People are struggling nowadays, and a lot, I felt, were being helped by the education that they got there.”

For people with knowledge or skills deficits, the program helped bridge the gaps holding them back from starting a new career path or post-secondary education, says Stephanie Solarz, the author of a study on the experiences of female students at the Lac La Biche Job Corps published in The Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education.

“It’s a loss to those folks who otherwise don’t have the bridging program that they need to access further formal education,” she said.

Having grown up in the area, Solarz had heard personal success stories “of folks who had been on income support, possibly with addictions and/or homeless, and then went through the program and now had a job in the oil industry in Fort Mac and stopped by in a very nice truck to visit and say thanks.”

Statistics from the program suggested these personal stories were consistent outcomes, and Solarz was drawn to study how the staff were having such a large impact.

“I have a background in foundational education, and I know that federally and provincially the success rate average for foundational learning is about 60 per cent. And Job Corps was much closer to between 85 and 90 per cent,” she said.

More than 20 communities throughout Alberta have at some point had a Job Corps program, but few boasted the same rate of success.

Over nearly 30 years, the Lac La Biche Job Corps, ran by a small staff of tradespeople rather than social workers, developed in-house programs for welding, carpentry, small engine mechanics, and painting, to name a few, while other locations contracted out their trades instruction.

More than the list of career training offered, Solarz says Lac La Biche’s program outperformed others because staff built relationships with students and fostered a sense of community belonging. “Staff really saw students as people and recognized their lives and circumstances outside of the program and how that would impact them and then worked with them to overcome those barriers,” she said.

“I think the Lac La Biche Job Corps was unique. And I’m not aware of any program that’s similar to it.”

A spokesperson for the Minister of Seniors, Community, and Social Services said in an e-mail that despite the closure of Job Corps, “Albertans have access to a variety of career and employment services that can support career planning and job search efforts, as well as job placement supports that help Albertans locate and obtain employment.”

According to a Government of Alberta employment services directory, all but one of these services are offered virtually.

While Job Corps may have been unique, its end was not. Social services in rural Alberta have for years been increasingly centralized and moved online, a process that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A report commissioned by the Rural Municipalities of Alberta on Family and Community Support Services (FCSS) delivery challenges noted that in-person services for several social service agencies were reduced or shuttered during the pandemic, and that assistance for mental health supports, victim services, senior supports, and AISH applications have increasingly been transitioned to “1-800” lines or websites.

“Unfortunately, there’s a lot of people in our rural communities that don’t necessarily have access to good reliable internet, which means they don’t have access to these services that are required. It’s harming our communities” said Karen Rosvold, County of Grande Prairie councillor and former president of The Family and Community Support Services Association of Alberta.

Rosvold said the barriers rural people face in navigating centralized services has created a situation where if they can’t access these supports or stop trying, provincial statistics record a decline in need. “And that feeds the narrative that we’re doing better. We don’t have as many people requiring [social services].”

Regardless of how accessible online social services are, removing in-person offices means people need to leave the community to get assistance, and takes away the element of community building that comes with helping and being helped by someone you know, she said.

“You can’t put a price on good community,” Rosvold said. “If we can keep our kids close to home, keep our people close to home, then we raise better humans. We feel better about who we are and what we do. And then you have happier communities.”

In Lac La Biche and other communities, the decline of in-person programs has also coincided with worsening social problems like crime and substance abuse. The second article in this series will focus on these often overlooked downstream effects of social service cuts on rural Alberta.

Brett McKay, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, St. Albert Gazette