Moncton — “Look at this — thousands of jobs in Moncton, and zero applicants,” said Donald Arseneault, the minister in charge of population growth in New Brunswick, while pointing at a website he made himself a few weeks ago, realjobs4realpeeps.wordpress.nb.ca.
“This is New Brunswick’s foremost jobs site, I personally post opportunities here every single day, and yet lazy job-seekers just don’t bother applying. I simply don’t understand it. The name is a hell of a lot catchier than ‘CareerBeacon’ or ‘Indeed’ or ‘LinkedIn’ — those don’t even sound like job boards.”
Arseneault has been working with the City of Moncton to bring in skilled employees to fill thousands of vacant jobs in the booming Maritime centre.
“We have to look to America, it seems,” Aresenault said, “because these entitled New Brunswickers refuse to do work that they consider below them. Work is work. Just because you have an engineering degree doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take nighttime janitorial shift-work at the university you attended. This sense of superiority is the reason we can’t fill the thousands of wonderful jobs concentrated in the Hub City.
“That and the fact that no one seems to be taking advantage of my website,” he added, checking today’s WordPress stats indicating that the job site had one visitor over the past week. “You can’t help those who won’t help themselves.”
A Manatee reporter was the one visitor to the site this week; we were able to confirm that the entirety of realjobs4realpeeps.wordpress.nb.ca is done up in Comic Sans font, with a ticker on the homepage counting all-time site visitors. The site also automatically plays weird music penned by Arseneault, and displays the song lyrics in quotes.
Unemployed Monctonian Trevor Burton said he has been ardently searching for work for nearly two years.
“I can’t believe they’re saying there are no New Brunswickers to fill the supposed vacancies. We’re skilled, we’re educated, we’re bilingual — but where are these jobs? It’s so frustrating to find out that my own government is recruiting Americans. It’s like they’ve just given up on us.”
Moncton employer Gertrude LeBlanc of FutureTech Netscapes Inc. said despite her company having job vacancies, no one has applied.
“We just need a few good bilingual people with experience in sales and customer service,” she said. “Surely we could find these candidates in Moncton. But Don Arseneault said he would ‘take care of it.’ Turns out he only posted the ad on his crappy website, then spent all our remaining advertising money on hosting a job fair in New York City. So now I’m waiting on these Americans to get visas and all the necessary paperwork.”
Arseneault said any unemployed New Brunswickers are welcome to compete against the incoming Americans for New Brunswick jobs.
“We will give priority to the Americans, though. They just have a better work ethic.”