“It can be quite a struggle to find good quality workers who are willing to work at what we feel is a competitive price point,” Grant said. “We are competing with some really exorbitant wage offerings compared with what we can offer here.”

Dan Reader, president of Surrey’s Murray Latta Progressive Machinery, said his company has seen gradual improvement every year since the 2009-10 depths of the recession. The 95-year-old company, which makes custom machinery, is accustomed to the ups and downs of B.C.’s resource sector; like Falcon Equipment, much of its current business comes from Canada’s oil and gas sector.

“There’s definitely a skilled labour issue brewing as this baby boomer bulge starts to retire,” Reader said. “If any of these very large northern projects in northern B.C. and Alberta get moving, that could be an additional draw from the Lower Mainland. For those two reasons we see a storm brewing.”

Matjaz Paulic, owner of plastics moulding company PhMolds, said business is good, but his market has become more domestic since 2008. The U.S. customers he lost during the recession haven’t come back.

The lower Canadian dollar benefits industries like forestry, which use B.C. materials and sell their products internationally. But Grant, Reader and Paulic said their companies, which primarily supply the Canadian market, don’t see much of a benefit from a lower dollar because they buy their raw materials in U.S. dollars and sell their products in Canadian dollars.

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