Perry C. Joyce (right), who is unemployed and uses Pathways Information Centre in the Downtown Eastside, works on a computer at Pathways Information Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia, Thursday, January 05, 2012.
Perry Joyce never imagined it would be so tough to find work in B.C. He could always find a job in Ontario. The fibre-reinforced plastics business had kept him employed for more than 25 years.
Mr. Joyce, 54, came out to the West Coast in 2007 after his father died in order to put down some roots. "But the economy is just not co-operating," Mr. Joyce said. "I got out here when the economy started going south."
He worked for a boat-building company in Kelowna for four months and was laid off. He found work in nearby Summerland. "The economy got worse and worse," he said. Four months later, he was once again out of work.
A few months later, he found a job in Vancouver but that lasted only two months. Then work in Mission, B.C., followed by a job on Vancouver Island. He quit his last job, fixing boats for a company in Lion's Bay north of Vancouver, when his paycheques bounced.
"This recent economic downturn that we have been going through in the last [few]years has smacked the boating industry really hard. A lot of boat builders have gone under or retrenched," he said.
His life in Ontario had not prepared him for this. Mr. Joyce, who was born in Washington state, spent his teenage years in Kingston. He enlisted in the U.S. navy after high school where he was trained as a welder and worked on servicing nuclear-powered submarines.
Mr. Joyce returned to Kingston in 1980 after four years in the navy and began working with fibre-reinforced plastics. His curriculum vitae says he served in a supervisory capacity in several small fibre-reinforced plastics facilities and as a shop steward in a large production shop, taking part in negotiations and handling grievances. He has experience with quality assurance programs and inspection processes, and can perform repairs on decks and hull systems in all mediums used in the boatbuilding industry.
He has been married three times, and has a daughter back in Ontario. He ended up in the Downtown Eastside because he was a poor money manager, he said. He came to Pathways, realizing that he had to go back to school for retraining if he wanted to stay in the fibreglass business.
Mr. Joyce said he would leave B.C. for a job. "I just want to work in my profession," he said.