It seems, however, that hundreds of Canadians secretly harbour latent desires to see the North Atlantic island, and have responded to his call by the boat load.
So much interest was aroused among Canadian workers with construction experience that Scandia Housing co-founder Mr. Thorbjornsson has had to put new applicants on ice, at least until he expands his firm's operations to other parts of the world.
An article in the Ottawa Business Journal last month described the Carleton Place's construction company's need to turn down construction projects in Mr. Thorbjornsson's native Iceland. Requests for projects were turned down because Scandia couldn't recruit enough contractors to fill the company's needs, neither in Iceland nor Canada.
Icelanders had fallen in love with Canadian-style wood-frame homes, which Scandia builds using materials and pre-fabricated parts shipped from Carleton Place through Montreal and by ship to Rotterdam then on to Iceland. Scandia filled a niche in the seismically-active and windy country by building the wooden homes to strict Icelandic building codes.
Less than a week after the story ran in the OBJ, CBC Radio interviewed Mr. Thorbjornsson for at least three radio stories, which ran both locally and nationally. Later, Embassy newsweekly in Ottawa also wrote about Scandia's efforts to bring more Canadian construction workers to Iceland. Then, English-language Iceland Review Online published a story on Canadians "flocking " to its country for work.
"A newspaper in Winnipeg with a very high Icelandic Canadian readership did an interview with us, too, " Mr. Thorbjornsson added.
So much attention was brought to his human resource plight that Mr. Thorbjornsson now says he has no employment vacancies to fill, at least for the moment.
"We have 200 applicants already, " he said. "The phone hasn't stopped since we started. We've hired everything we need for now. We'll be hiring more later. "
While promising a slightly higher salary than the Canadian average for similar construction work, Scandia also offered to pick up the food, lodging and even some entertainment expenses for its workers while they were in Iceland for six-to eight-week cycles.
The prospect of going whale watching or volcano sightseeing in a new country inspired so many Canadians that they couldn't reach Mr. Thorbjornsson quickly enough.
"People have been calling the (Icelandic) Embassy. People have been calling Friends of Iceland, " he said, referring to a local Ottawa club for which Mr. Thorbjornsson serves on the board of directors.
"The response has been overwhelming, and has empowered us to look at other markets and to look at other countries as well, " he said.
He said the company has hired the 30 or so workers it needed for its next tour of Iceland, and is stockpiling resumes for the future.
"We're always going through a lot of people. With this interest, we're going to take on new projects, " he said, listing the possibility of expanding his business model to Spain and Russia.
"The next (cycle to Iceland) is going in early March, " he added. "And there's a very big crew going out in April. We're building the largest single-family home ever built in Iceland, at about 6,000 square feet. It's very big on an Icelandic scale. It wouldn't blow anyone away in Canada, but it's big for Iceland. "
