Asakara81

Hi All

I'm new to this site and looking for some info on work and life in canada been offered a job in prince rupert as a pipefitter/gas fitter. Read a lot of different reviews on prince rupert don't really know which is true. The job I have been offered starts with a salary of around $36 a hour van,gas card and health benefits is this enough to live on with a wife and son up in that area or not?

Any info would be welcomed and much appreciated as experience counts for a lot more than reading.

Many thanks


Asa

old.sparkles

Hi Asa and welcome to BE

I've moved your post over to our Canadian section - hopefully someone will be able to help with the advice you need

Lychee

I have never lived there, but I have visited there. It's a remote community (2 hour flight from the nearest big city, and flights are expensive), but the landscape is spectacular. The First Nations (native) populations play a large role in the local culture and community. Fishing, forestry, the port, wildlife/whale watching tourism, and Alaska cruises play a significant part in the local economy. The seafood is incredible. It's also the rainiest place in all of coastal BC, consistent grey skies, seldom sunny. However, when it's sunny, the place is jaw-dropping gorgeous. The older downtown area is depressed, while the newer Cow Bay neighbourhood is attractive. The city, in general, is tiny. It's amazingly cheap to live there, so you should get by on that wage, but be prepared for a culture shock and a completely new lifestyle. Prince Rupert, though sounds British, is as far away from Nottingham life as you can get. Say goodbye to shopping, football, English pub culture, public transit, cheap flights, diversity in restaurants, and so on. Are you ready for that? You are also going to be far away from everything by living there. Far, far, far away. Distances are vast and it costs $$$$$ to get anywhere. Are you ready to stay put in a tiny isolated city for your foreseeable future?

Asakara81

When you say get by do you mean just get by or will be ok to still have money left to do other things as well ? Had a friend who I work with moved to terrace seven years ago he lasted there three years and now lives in kelowna he has told me a little bit about prince rupert, how it's very isolated but you have to start somewhere as long as it not riddled with crime and the education system is half decent I can build on the rest. We are an out going couple who like the outdoor life and aren't after having a big city life we want a quite life out in the sticks with weekends to spend quality time together with our son having a decent education or is this far from what I'm expecting.

Asa

Oink

You might be but the locals aren't. Its a place people don't move to by choice.

Asakara81

Why is that ?

Oink

Because in the main, Canadians are very insular and tend to stick to their familial cultural and religious groups and rarely let outsiders connect other than in a cursory and superficial way. This trend is usually mitigated by the more urbanized and educated they are. You have to realize that rural in north America isn't like rural in Europe, it won’t be Tuscany or Provence, it’ll be poor and isolated, usually dependent on a single resource extraction or processing, as such it'll have the same problems most rural places in Canada have, it'll be relatively depressed with a lot of social problems enhanced by alcohol and drug abuse.

R I C H

Food for thought from Wikipedia:

Prince Rupert was ranked 193rd out of the 200 Canadian cities in MoneySense Magazine's Best Places 2013, the lowest rank of any city in British Columbia.

Prince Rupert is known as "The City of Rainbows", as it is Canada's wettest city, with 2,590 millimetres (102 in) of annual precipitation on average, in addition, 240 days per year have at least some precipitation, and there are only 1230 hours of sunshine per year - It is regarded as the municipality in Canada which receives the least amount of sunshine annually.

So it's gloomy, wet and undesirable.

Asakara81

You are a lot closer than I am,thank you for your comments would it be a place you could bring up a young family?

Siouxie

You might want to look at a few of the videos on Youtube of Prince Rupert to get an idea of what it is like there and how isolated it is.

Particularly this one:

http://www.youtube.com/results?searc...ince+rupert+bc

A flight from PR to Vancouver for the weekend will set you back in the region of $530 return for 1 adult.

If you are a pipefitter, have you looked at Alberta Temporary Foreign Worker pilot - no LMO required - it might open your options up a bit.

https://www.albertacanada.com/files/...steam-pipe.pdf

You could also apply for Permanent Residency under the FSW (Trades) program (though it takes quite a while to be processed) http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigra...plications.asp

R I C H

Of course you could. Would I choose to move thousands of miles, spend thousands of pounds emigrating and select it out of choice to? No.

If you crave wilderness, beautiful scenery, outdoor recreation and a rural lifestyle, there are 100s of other options. If the driving factor is work related you'll have to make your own decision whether it's a good decision or not.

bc_guy

There are lot of earthquakes in northern coastal BC. Northwest BC is like the California of Canada when it comes to earthquakes. I remember back in 2012 when there were fears of a tsunami impacting Vancouver Island due to a powerful earthquake in the Prince Rupert area. This was only a year after the western half of the island got hit by that tsunami from Japan.

I wouldn't live in a quake zone but that's just my preference. With current technology, they're very unpredictable. But then again, we're only 15 years away from getting precise earthquake-predicting weather satellite systems.

Mikeypm

Prince Rupert might be an improvement on Nottingham though

Novocastrian

WTF is that supposed to mean? BTW, where in BC do you live?

bc_guy

Well, I used to live in Nanaimo. There was a magnitude 7 quake up in Prince Rupert when I was living there and there was a lot of speculation as to whether that would have generated a tsunami.

But it's actually the Queen Charlotte Islands and the extremely northwestern parts of coastal BC that get all the quakes since they're on fault lines. Prince Rupert doesn't get them as often as the QC Islands and more northern coastal areas of BC.

About the earthquake-predicting technology, watch this video if you'd like to know more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_fLMtkCntY