Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
My name is Bob Blakely, and I am privileged to represent the men and women who build and maintain Canada.
With me today is Mr. David Wade from the Newfoundland and Labrador building and construction trades.
We're in an industry that employs over a million Canadians but has no permanent jobs. For every construction job that happens in Canada, the day you are hired on, you are one day closer to being laid off. Unlike others who are here with an “ask”, I am here to give you money.
I have a scheme that will help meet a number of challenges the Government of Canada faces and get Canadians with skills from one area to another in this country. If you look at the labour market information available, you will find that areas like Newfoundland and Labrador will face significant labour shortages from now until 2014. Ontario will be flat until 2015. Alberta, Nova Scotia, and Quebec need numbers of workers.
In a transitory business, we need to be able to move people from one place to another in the country. According to some of the studies that have been done, 70% of all construction workers move, either within the province or within the country, in order to access work during their careers. What we are proposing is a tax credit program that would allow workers who fall within areas where skills are required to be able to claim a tax credit for money they spend moving from one part of the country to another. Workers benefit by getting a reduction in their temporary relocation costs. Employers will benefit from having access to a much larger pool of workers. The Government of Canada will benefit. If you look at the investment scheme described in the materials, you'll see that after an initial short-term investment, the Government of Canada will recover money at a rate of about five to one.
We have a number of suggestions as to how you could set up a pilot project and monitor it. I'm not going to waste a lot of time going through that. Suffice it to say, we're asking here for something that will help construction workers move from one part of the country to another. Newfoundland, which has been a traditional exporter of people, is going to be an importer of people over the next three or four years.
We're also asking for some tax fairness here. If, instead of being construction workers, we were engineers or architects or superintendents who incorporated ourselves as one-person companies, we would be able to write off our travel expenses at 100¢ on the dollar. We can't do that as working guys.
Teamsters, who are long-haul truckers and who move across the country, can write off their expenses. We're asking for a tax credit that would help move people, who we desperately need, from one part of the country to another. I know Mr. Jean can tell you that in Fort McMurray they need people.
If you look at the background, at how long we've been talking about this, in 2008 the standing committee on human resources and social development talked about creating some sort of relocation assistance to help people who move from place to place. There is a private member's bill that has been introduced in the last three parliaments, which now is Bill C-201, introduced by Chris Charlton from Hamilton Mountain. It talks about how we could assist people with skills to move.
The time has come. The baby boomer generation, which no one expected was ever going to retire, is going to retire. We have spaces for nearly 2,500 people to enter the construction industry in the next five years, and another 163,000 people in the five years after that. It's an industry that is going to change. If we have trained people all across the country, we need to be able to move them.
We are talking about a way the Government of Canada can lever its investment and have a worker in Corner Brook work in Alberta for a very low cost, instead of being on unemployment insurance at home because he can't afford to travel.
That's my pitch. Thank you.