With regard to the labour mobility tax deduction, that was a very progressive measure that was passed in the previous budget, in 2022, I believe. That is something that Canada's Building Trades Unions has been working on for decades in terms of providing incentives for construction workers to leave their home provinces, their home communities, to go to work.
Previously, if you were to do that, the tax act was such that you weren't able to deduct any of those expenses related to that travel to work. That was an impediment for workers to go to where the work is. Putting that into place has provided an incentive, a benefit, for workers to relocate and now deduct some of those expenses from their income. It's not a credit but a tax deduction, which I think is critically important.
The second piece in terms of interprovincial labour mobility is that the unionized construction industry has a lot of mobility across provinces. That's the way we work. We work mostly on large projects. For example, at LNG Canada right now, I would say that we have 2,000 workers from all over Canada there in British Columbia.
With the provinces being responsible for labour, the challenge we have is with regard to the recognition of trades. In some cases, a Red Seal trade in one province isn't recognized as a Red Seal trade in another province, and this is vexing to our industry. It's something that should be solved, but it's been hanging around, in the nature of federal-provincial relationships, for over 25 years. That could be fixed, and that would help with labour mobility as well.
As for the third piece around express entry, we support that. With regard to express entry for immigration, our position is that the union should be allowed to act as the sponsor of the immigrant when and where a union is interested in doing so, because it's not homogeneous across the country. Some unions would like to do this; some wouldn't. However, where they would like to do it and where there's a need, we think it would be very beneficial to the industry and also to the new Canadian, because now they're in the union hall, and they receive the requisite training, English as a second language.... They're protected from exploitation. We're able to build our workforce in a more sustainable manner than with temporary foreign workers, for example.