Thank you for allowing us to appear before you today.
My name is Steven Schumann. I am the Canadian government affairs director for the International Union of Operating Engineers, or IUOE for short.
With me is Brain Pelletier. He's our aboriginal coordinator for our local 793 in Ontario.
The IUOE is a progressive and diversified trade union with nearly 50,000 members in Canada. Our members operate the tower and mobile cranes, the bulldozers, the graders, and the backhoes that help form and shape the infrastructure and skylines of Canada.
Within the construction industry we provide some of the most highly skilled, safe, and technical positions in this industry. Because of the nature of our work, we are also some of the best paid and highly sought-after positions in the construction sector. We, through our various state-of-the-art training centres, provide rigorous but necessary training to ensure our students become successful and productive tradespersons. Our facilities are registered within their particular province of operation as well as with Employment and Social Development Canada. Our facilities are open to all Canadians, non-union and union, and are considered world leaders in the promotion and development of heavy equipment operation.
Currently, through our local training centres, we provide employment and training opportunities to aboriginal peoples throughout Canada, either directly or through various agreements with companies; first nations, Inuit, and Métis organizations; and governments. The size and impact of these endeavours vary from province to province.
As the committee is aware, the construction sector is facing a shortage in skilled labour. Over 200,000 new skilled workers are required by 2018. We believe through proper training and real opportunities, Canada's aboriginal community can and should be a solution to Canada's skilled labour shortage. We can provide many positive examples of how well this has been working, but for today, I would like to focus on several challenges that must be dealt with to ensure that all aboriginal peoples have the opportunity to obtain recognized industry credentials and be part of the Canadian workforce.
Some of these challenges that I will touch on briefly include improper training, training availability, cultural challenges, need to improve life and essential skills, mandated quotas, and referral hiring systems.
We believe there are too many organizations offering inadequate training that does not meet the need of the industry, nor provide aboriginal peoples with the necessary training to be properly prepared for employment in the trades. From our perspective, we think time, effort, and funding would generate greater results if only training centres recognized by the provincial government and ESDC be allowed to provide training that is government-funded.
We also understand there are concerns about the lack of accessible training. This, unfortunately, is a fact. In our industry, training on heavy equipment is very expensive. We have permanent training centres that may not be ideally located for some individuals, but we cannot have multiple training centres in a province. It's just not cost-effective. In some cases, we work with groups, like the Nunavut government, to send their students to our school in Ontario. We also have other examples that Mr. Pelletier can cite. We know this is neither cheap nor does it work for every group. But we've also worked with our employers on major projects to develop on-site training through project labour agreements. We also have been developing training models that allow us to make our training more mobile.
We recognize the need for a successful training model that meets the needs of first nations, Inuit, and Métis communities, but this model needs a long-term commitment and also financial support of the federal government. We also believe training centres need to do more to address aboriginal culture and improve the life and essential skills that are required by aboriginal peoples to enter their trade. Training centres must work with the various aboriginal communities to understand these challenges. Our training centres have taken some measures in an effort to remove some of these barriers. These include offering a pre-course to prepare individuals to take the trade entrance exam, implementing orientation sessions for potential candidates to determine whether or not heavy equipment trades is a career for them, and employment readiness courses to provide students with the tools and techniques needed to find and achieve employment in the construction industry.
Our school in Morrisburg, Ontario, has a campus that provides living conditions similar to living in a work camp, to give students a first-hand account of what life is like on the job site. Also, hiring aboriginal staff and developing an aboriginal engagement strategy is important.
Another significant challenge for the construction industry is to encourage aboriginal peoples to leave their community for periods of time to work on projects away from home. The problem is, once a particular job is done in their community, in most cases, the individual returns home and would rather be unemployed than travel far for work. We are reaching out to aboriginal organizations to play a role in providing solutions to this challenge.
We have tried to address it through mentorship and role models. Those aboriginal peoples who have made a career in the trades are the best spokespersons. We believe success will breed success.
Another problem is that we also believe that mandated hiring quotas, or a referral system, as some may call it, may not be the best solution. Some contractors do not abide by these hiring systems and will use avoidance techniques not to hire aboriginal workers. However, we believe if the aboriginal worker possesses industry-recognized training credentials from an accredited training institution, it would be a good first step and would make it more difficult to be ignored.
We are also strong advocates of ASETS. The approximately 83 agreement holders throughout Canada have built the capacity to find solutions to aboriginal human resource issues. They must continue to receive and have authority to spend the budgets as well as the authority to design and develop labour market programs to meet aboriginal individual and community needs.
We sincerely wish that we could do more in providing opportunities to aboriginal people, but despite being leaders in training, we face challenges of exclusion from government programs because we do not employ the tradesperson—we just train—and some groups, like contractors and some bands, are unwilling to work with us because they see us as a union.
We have the capacity to support first nations, Inuit, and Métis people to find self-fulfillment through work and become self-sufficient. The best social program is a job leading to a career.
The IUOE is working with aboriginal communities to accomplish this goal. Our approach benefits aboriginal communities, our industry, but most important, it makes Canada stronger. We just need some cooperation to allow us to reach our potential as trainers.
We would like to thank you for allowing us the opportunity to present today. We hope you have found this information useful, and we look forward to answering any questions and expanding on what we have said.