Union official Anne Geehan on the oilsands job market: 'It's all sort of coming down.' (CBC)

A move by an Alberta oilsands giant to put expansion plans on hold will have a dire effect on workers on the other side of the country, a union official says.

Suncor, the second-largest producer in the oilsands, declared its first-ever quarterly loss this week and shelved activity on the Voyageur and Firebag expansion projects.

Anne Geehan, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers' local in St. John's, said the announcement is the latest in a series that has taken the wind out of an industry that has provided work to thousands of migrating workers from Newfoundland and Labrador.

"Alberta has been so good to us…. We've had many men up there all this year, all last year, but right now it's slowed down because a lot of the projects [including] Suncor — it's all sort of coming down," said Geehan.

"Some of them have scaled back, some of them are on hold right now. So it isn't very good right now."

Scaffolding worker Clyde Hooper says he is not sure his Suncor job will still exist in a few weeks. (CBC)

Geehan said IBEW members have relied on work in Alberta's camps for steady, high-paid employment.

Geehan said the rapid turnaround — fuelled by the collapse in the price of oil since last fall — is making for the worst market conditions she has seen for the union in the last 20 years.

Clyde Hooper, who lives in Rock Harbour on Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula, said he had been hoping in the next few weeks to return to his Suncor job as a scaffolder.

Now, he said, he fears the site will be mothballed.

"It is getting to be so uncertain up there that I'm fearful that I don't think I'll have a job," he said.

"If the bottom falls out of Alberta, we'll make it somehow ... I guess Newfoundlanders overall, we're used to hard times anyway. That's how we came here and that's how we'll probably leave. You know — that's the way we are."