Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Thanks for the invitation to be here today.
As the CFIB and likely Perrin and the Chamber of Commerce will say, this is a critical issue for our members.
We believe we're at a critical point in our economic development. Employee skills and the ability of employers to attract and retain skilled workers will be central to our economic success over the next decade. CME has projected there could be more than 500 major projects across Canada, projects such as mining, oil and gas extraction, energy development, and shipbuilding, which represent over half a trillion dollars in new investments over the next decade. However, Canada must do more than simply extract and export these resources to take advantage of this opportunity. Canada's opportunity is to develop a world-class manufacturing, technology, and services supply chain for these natural resource projects and to export this expertise globally.
However, today there are already hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs across Canada in all sectors of the economy. The inability of companies to match available jobs with available workers has a huge impact on their ability to innovate and improve competitiveness and to compete globally. Too often, applicants for available jobs do not have the necessary skill requirements, meaning jobs go unfilled, projects are not started, and Canada's economy suffers. As major projects continue to be developed, the need for skilled and unskilled workers will only intensify in those sectors as well as in related sectors in manufacturing and exporting.
To help better understand these challenges, CME is currently undergoing a survey of industry to determine the major concerns and priorities for companies today and in the near future. While the survey is still being conducted, the early results are very concerning. When asked about their primary concerns, businesses told us that the increased competition companies face in their primary markets was their top concern. Their second-largest concern was the availability of labour, both skilled and unskilled, and the impact that it will have on their operations. When asked how the labour market has changed over the past three years, half of all respondents said that it had worsened. Most concerning of all, 90% of respondents to date have indicated that they would have to consider moving their production to other jurisdictions in order to fill their labour needs.
There is no silver bullet to fix these labour challenges. We must all work together.
From an industry perspective, there are several actions being taken. Companies are increasing their training to improve the skills of existing workers and to better train and integrate new employees. They're also investing in technology in an effort to increase productivity and working with post-secondary institutions to ensure that graduates coming from these schools have the skills necessary to immediately enter the workforce. Where institutions do not exist, companies are actually creating these institutions to help with their training needs.
To support industry efforts, CME itself recently launched an industrial information and job-matching service called iCME.ca. In its first month of operation, we have had over 250 job postings and have matched dozens of qualified employees with existing jobs. Our goal is to strengthen this service by tying it into the EI system so that EI claimants have access to the available jobs in our network as well as into the immigration system so that foreign-trained workers can be pre-selected for available jobs and quickly enter the workforce.
While these are all positive steps, much more must be done. Canada must become a world leader in creating a truly global, flexible, and modern workforce that supports multinational businesses as well as local operations and smaller companies in all sectors of the economy.
Some of the recent changes announced by the government, including the changes to the temporary foreign worker program and the EI system, are a good start; however, we believe there should be much more done to create a modern workforce and supportive policy framework, including creating a partnership between the federal and provincial governments to introduce employee training tax credits. Tax credits exist to support new hires, but not to support upgrading skills of existing employees. We need an aboriginal workplace inclusion strategy. The foreign-worker credential system should be streamlined and simplified to maximize labour mobility, with the focus being placed on worker skills rather than academic credentials alone. Temporary foreign workers should be allowed to enter Canada with minimal paperwork and delay, and qualified companies should be provided waivers from the bureaucratic processes that delay entrance today. Employees should be able to move freely between Canadian provinces and between Canada and the United States. The pan-Canadian framework for the assessment and recognition of foreign qualifications should be expanded to include skills of those such as construction millwrights, industrial mechanics, structural metal fabricators, welders, and steamfitters. Finally, in the immigration system, changes must go further to be much more efficient in selecting qualified personnel and their family to meet industry needs and to streamline them into the immigration process itself.
We believe these policy changes will help create a much more flexible and responsive labour pool that will allow Canada's economy to grow with the economic opportunities before us.
Thank you very much. I look forward to the discussion.