Good morning, Chair Fonseca and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to take part in the pre-budget consultations earlier this year and for the invitation to appear today. Unfortunately, my colleague Ms. Rita Rahmati will not be able to join us today.
My name is Sean Strickland. I am the executive director of Canada’s Building Trades Unions, part of North America’s Building Trades Unions. We represent 14 international construction unions with a combined membership of over three million unionized construction workers in North America, with 600,000 here in Canada.
The women and men of the building trades are employed in constructing everything from small projects through to large multi-billion dollar projects right across Canada. The construction and maintenance sector combined represents approximately 6% of Canada’s annual GDP.
Budget 2022 included important wins for workers, including the historic win for Canada’s construction workers—something the building trades have been advocating for for a long time—namely, a labour mobility tax deduction for tradespeople. Under this proposal, they will now be able to deduct those expenses from their income, something they previously could not do under the Income Tax Act. This will make it easier for construction workers to go where [Technical difficulty—Editor]—