Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll be sharing my time with Ave Lethbridge.
My name is Jim Burpee. I'm the president and CEO of the Canadian Electricity Association, CEA. We are the national voice of electricity in Canada and have been since 1891.
Across the country, our members provide electricity generation, transmission, and distribution services to industrial, commercial, residential, and institutional clients. We represent all industry stakeholders, including utility companies, large and small, energy traders, and representatives from the full electricity value chain including suppliers of equipment, technology, and services.
Your current study on young apprentices, and much of your recent work on labour shortages, is of great interest to our membership. The decisions and recommendations you make are important and will have impacts on our industry.
As is the case with most major employers in Canada today, and as you have no doubt heard repeatedly, the electricity sector is facing a shortage of skilled workers as a result of the imminent wave of baby boomer retirements, but what makes our industry unique, and our human resource challenges particularly acute, are additional labour market pressures that will require even more workers with many new and varied skill sets.
Most of Canada's electrical power grid was built over 25 years ago to serve a population of 20 million. Today, that population exceeds 34 million, people whose lifestyles are increasingly dependent on electrical devices.
As an industry, we are embarking on ambitious new projects, transformative projects, to bring electricity infrastructure in line with the needs of the 21st century.
According to the Conference Board of Canada, investment in the renewal of Canada's electricity infrastructure will result in an average of 156,000 jobs each year over the next 20 years. To put that into context, the 108,000 that Michelle and Norm mentioned, those are regular employees of the utilities. The 156,000 are in the construction trades, engineering, and all the support to do the capital investment. That's the capital program as well as the ongoing, whereas the 108,000 represents the ongoing operations and maintenance.
We're talking about construction jobs to build generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure, jobs in management and finance, in applied science and engineering, and in sales and transportation. We're talking about jobs in every province and territory in the country.
The labour requirements to accommodate this investment in electricity infrastructure will exert additional pressure on an already tight labour market.
In addition to the infrastructure challenge, the electricity grid as envisioned by Edison is being turned on its head by the development of new smart grid technologies. Across the country and around the world, innovative people are coming up with great ideas.
Development of technologies relating to electric vehicle integration, electricity storage, renewable forms of generation, to name just a few, are characterized by their information-based applications that will require employee skill sets very different from those required to operate the electricity system most of us have known in our lifetimes.
This is a terrific time to be involved in the electricity sector, but we will need to train, recruit, and retain the highly skilled workers to turn the smart grid vision into reality.
I'll now pass it over to Ave Lethbridge.