Mr. Chair, I wish to first of all thank the committee members for providing the Canadian Construction Association with the opportunity to appear before you in connection with your annual pre-budget consultations.
The Canadian Construction Association, as some of you know, represents some 20,000 member firms from coast to coast to coast in Canada, active in the non-residential sector of the construction industry. We build Canada's public infrastructure. We build many of Mr. Ferguson's members' facilities.
Since the theme for today's session is maximizing employment opportunities for Canadians, my comments will focus specifically on three recommendations we believe will help to achieve this goal. While I do not have a supplementary submission for you, I would be pleased to provide the committee with any follow-up information you may wish arising from my presentation.
As I said, our focus is on three specific measures. They are as follows: one, the need for a construction mobility tax credit; two, improvements and enhancements to the current federal apprenticeship job creation tax credit; and three, a change to the current capital allowance treatment of mobile diesel-powered construction equipment to better align depreciation rates with the useful service of the equipment and to bring such tax measures in line with those in the United States.
First of all, with respect to the mobility tax credit, while I appreciate there is a private member's bill before Parliament dealing with this matter currently, our approach to this issue is entirely non-partisan. We support the concept, and have supported the concept for several years now, regardless of the ultimate mechanism chosen by Parliament for its implementation.
Labour mobility is something that is critical to the construction industry, indeed critical to Mr. Ferguson's members' projects, which are often in very remote areas. Unlike the workforces of many other industries which are attached to a given location, the construction industry's workforce must be mobile in order to follow the work wherever it may be. If we have a mining project in northern British Columbia, we can't move the mine to downtown Toronto.
While it is true that employers will generally cover the expenses associated with sending their employees to relocate temporarily to work at distant or remote work sites, that is not the case for unemployed tradespeople seeking work in more hot markets than their home markets.
Construction workers are used to leaving their homes and families to work at distant sites for periods of time. A 2007 study conducted by the Construction Sector Council found that 70% of surveyed tradespeople travelled to find work at least once in their careers. Canada's Building Trades Unions have research that suggests the average mobile construction worker spends approximately $3,500 of his or her own money to temporarily relocate.
The sector council study I mentioned also found that the cost of temporary relocation is one of the biggest impediments to labour force mobility in the construction industry. We need a construction workforce that is mobile if we are going to meet the tremendous demand our industry is seeing from the resource-based sector, with some 600 resource-based projects to proceed in the next 10 years, worth over $650 billion, many of which are in remote parts of our country. For this reason, we are championing the concept of a mobility tax credit.
Second is the apprenticeship job creation tax credit. We applaud the federal government for the introduction of various support programs designed to encourage apprenticeship training across the country. I want to focus on the apprenticeship job creation tax credit, because it's really the only federal incentive for employers to actually engage apprentices, in this case first-year and second-year apprentices.
The apprenticeship job creation tax credit was lauded by our members when it was first introduced. We believed it would help incentivize smaller firms with fewer resources to become more directly engaged in apprenticeship training. The credit provides an employer incentive to hire first-year and second-year Red Seal trade apprentices through an annual non-refundable tax credit equal to a maximum of $2,000 of eligible salaries and wages per apprentice.
However, a 2007 Canada Revenue Agency ruling effectively removed any incentive by treating the tax credit as government assistance and wage subsidies and requiring it to be included in the taxpayer's income the following year. So if you take the tax credit one year, you have to bring that amount back in.