Thank you. My name is David Wassmansdorf. I'm the immediate past president of the Canadian Home Builders' Association. I'm a home builder and land developer based in Burlington. As we were talking about before, this is my volunteer gig.
With me today is Mary Lawson. Mary is the past-past president of the Home Builders' Association. Mary is based in Orangeville.
With us as well today are resource people, our chief operating officer, John Kenward, and our director of human resource development, Paul Gravelle.
It's clear that we do have an extreme shortage of skilled trades in the residential construction industry. This affects both new home builders as well as renovators. This isn't simply a reflection of high levels of housing activity and renovation activity from the past few years. There has been a growing problem for a great number of years.
Over time, we've made representations on behalf of the housing industry that have largely been ignored. We feel there's an elitist view toward skills, a view dominated by organizations like HRSDC. Rather than taking a positive, action-oriented approach to addressing skills shortages, the department has been more prone to challenge the industry to continue to try to prove there's a problem. Continuous research has substituted for action. The existing culture resists change, breeds inactivity, and supports the status quo. The end result is inertia, and it has caused a significant deterioration in Canada's capacity to respond effectively to the demand for skilled people.
This isn't new. This culture breeds complexity, to the point where the array of actions in government-funded entities has become almost unpenetrable. There is an appearance of a great deal of activity, but very little ever gets done.
There is a need for clarity and definition on the federal government's role in the field of education and training, including transparency and accountability of its programs, funding agreements, and activities. And while provincial governments have jurisdiction over education and training, this alone does not explain why Canada has not moved forward with a coherent, integrated approach to Canada's skilled labour requirements.
Let's not use the excuse of jurisdiction for why we haven't moved forward. By way of analogy, I can point to the fact that the provincial jurisdiction for building codes has not prevented the development of a model national building code, which involves all affected parties in home building and construction and is adopted by provincial governments across the country. That is why we have a uniform code environment across the country. No such approach exists for addressing Canada's skilled labour requirements.
No one level of government has the capacity to address Canada's skilled labour shortages. As well, little progress can be achieved with governments acting independently of one another and participating in an inchoate array of activities that have a life of their own, consume resources, and don't produce results on the ground. There is a need for a comprehensive and cohesive national strategy to address Canada's skills requirements, including national training standards.
The education and training system requires high-level political direction at every level. The ministers must be directly engaged.
There needs to be a sense of results, measurability, and accountability. We need to ask what measurable progress is being made in reducing skilled labour shortages across the country; what measurable results we are getting from the federal government's various engagements and investments; and whether there is a strategic action plan to guide the federal government's efforts and to support interdepartmental and intergovernmental cooperation and coordination.
I can only think about the work that is being done at the federal level on smart government and smart regulation. Is there a plan to unleash the capacities of our education and training system and enable industries such as ours to participate in action-oriented initiatives? Where are the educators? Where are the mentors in all this?
The Canadian Home Builders' Association has developed a human resource development action plan that has been ignored. The work would focus on the following four strategic objectives: to support the development and delivery of training to occupations in the residential construction industry; to increase funding for industry training in order to increase the industry's capacity to participate in planning, decision-making, and implementing training in the residential construction industry on an ongoing basis; to support measures that will increase employee retention and improve job quality in the residential construction industry; and to promote careers in the residential construction industry.