Although New Brunswick remains one of the call centre capitals of Canada, there are demands for the provincial government to change its thinking about the industry.

Economists are warning that global competition, the high value of the Canadian dollar and the tight labour market are reshaping the future of the call centre business, especially in the Maritimes.

David Campbell, an independent economic consultant in Moncton, N.B., says New Brunswick should take a page from Nova Scotia's business plan and put more emphasis on attracting financial service and hedge fund centres, which pay bigger salaries.

Campbell says New Brunswick will never achieve its goal of becoming self-sufficient by 2026 if it keeps offering incentives to call centres that pay employees no more than $10 or $12 an hour.

"A $10-an-hour job pays very little provincial income tax or HST," Campbell says.

"Those jobs filled a need, but now that we have low unemployment, we need to look for jobs that will contribute taxes that will pay for government services. Essentially, we were attracting jobs that did not generate enough taxes to pay for the government services covering the worker."

Campbell says the province needs to bring in jobs that pay salaries of at least $40,000 and $50,000 a year if it is to get the kind of tax revenue it needs to become self-sufficient.

As well, he said, New Brunswick will not be able to persuade former residents to return from places like Alberta or attract immigrants if it's offering mostly low-paying jobs.

"They need to move up the food chain within corporations," he said.

"For instance, with the Royal Bank call centre in Moncton, why not try and get the Royal Bank data centre, or Royal Bank financial products web development, or the Royal Bank hedge fund back office? Move within companies that have had good experiences here and get the higher-end jobs."

New Brunswick greatly increased the number of call centres located in the province in the early 1990s through government incentives.

It now has centres for a number of major companies, including the Royal Bank, Purolator Courier and IBM.

Some of the more sophisticated contact centres have remained, especially in IT and financial services. But other centres that live from contract to contract, calling out to sell everything from phone service to insurance, have proved to be transient.

In a report last week, Statistics Canada said call centres traditionally have been viewed as regional economic tools and located in small urban centres with high unemployment and a skilled workforce.

Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Ontario have the highest concentrations of call centres in the country.

Ideal locations

Cities like Moncton and Halifax were considered ideal locations because they had an underemployed workforce that was high-school educated.

But the Statistics Canada report warns the higher dollar has eroded Canada's advantage as a preferred location for call centres.

It states that strong competition is coming from other countries, including China and India.

It's estimated India has captured as much as 60 per cent of the world's offshore call-centre business — with hundreds of thousands of workers answering customer calls for clients like British Telecom, Dell Inc., LinkSys and AOL.

The Statistics Canada report states that Canadian call centres are not just about cheap labour anymore, and they need to offer more value-added skills.

Mike Bacon, executive director ContactNB, an industry association, says the business is changing in New Brunswick.

"Everyone will tell you no matter what industry you're in that the labour market is tight, so the days of someone announcing a new 500-seat contact centre are gone," he says.

"That's not bad news. It wouldn't be a good business decision to come to town saying you're going to open a big centre."

$1 billion into economy

Bacon says about 22,000 people in New Brunswick are employed in the industry, which contributes roughly $1 billion a year to the economy.

He says the industry is stable, although AOL Canada closed the doors on its contact centre in Moncton this weekend.

The company is changing the way it does business and says it no longer needed the Moncton centre, which it described as "cost-prohibitive."

In Nova Scotia, where about 20,000 people work in the industry, Teletech Holdings of Colorado has announced it will lay off 485 workers at its Halifax call centre by the end of April — unless it can find a new client.

However, another U.S. company, Citco Group, has announced that over the next six years, it may create as many as 325 jobs at a new IT support centre in Halifax.

Citco, which serves the hedge fund industry, is the kind of company Campbell says he would like to see in New Brunswick.

"The vast majority of the call-centre activity in New Brunswick involves taking or making telephone calls," Campbell says.

"With the increasing use of the web, over time the need for labour-intensive call centres will diminish."