Evidence of meeting #136 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was apprenticeship.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:45 p.m.
Liberal
Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
I'm a Cape Bretoner, and we've been that pool of mobile labour.
12:45 p.m.
Liberal
Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
We worked on some of the biggest projects in North America. We take a fair degree of pride in what's gone on in Fort McMurray. I spent 10 years in Fort Mac. It was a great opportunity for us, but we know that we contributed to the success of oil sands development. Now that Alberta needs help and Saskatchewan needs some help, there has to be an answer. It seems a foreign thing for Ontario companies to provide that accommodation. However, when you look at the pension plans of some of the unions and at consortiums, there has to be an opportunity there to accommodate some of those so that guys rotate and come in for a month and go home for a month—whatever it might be. A little bit of creative thinking has to go into this to solve the problem—your problem—with the help of labour from western Canada. They've been good to the rest of Canada for a long time.
12:45 p.m.
Some hon. members
Oh, oh!
12:45 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Ontario Construction Secretariat
I wish the time had expired. That's a question. I think it's really complicated.
For senior personnel, this is happening. The senior supervisors and foremen who are key employees are being brought to Ontario and are being paid above-average wages. They're more in management or lower management. For the average worker, however, it's not happening. Guys are not being flown from other parts of Canada into Toronto.
Toronto is very competitive. The profit margins are not huge. It's very competitive, and for an employer to subsidize a worker for a long period of time.... Some of these projects go on for two or three years, if it's a hospital or LRT. This has been going on for over 10 years.
It's just not economically feasible if the worker doesn't want to participate and maybe take a pay cut or a reduction in where he lives.
12:50 p.m.
South Surrey—White Rock, Lib.
I'm turning my time over to GTHA legend Adam Vaughan.
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Adam Vaughan Liberal Spadina—Fort York, ON
I appreciate that part of the reality is that the regional dynamic of the GTA—the housing costs, the transportation costs—is an impediment to the fly-in labour forces that you might see in the oil patch but don't necessarily see in the condo patch of downtown Toronto.
There is, however, a group that has arrived in Toronto that is clearly a significant part of the construction workforce, but we don't like to talk about it. It's the undocumented workers. There are significant groups of temporary foreign workers, but also of people who have been here on student visas who have just quietly seeped into the building trades. They're at every single work site you go to.
Yet if you talk about a path to citizenship for undocumented workers, you get a sort of “get to the back of the line, get out of the country” reaction, almost the same treatment as is given to dreamers in the United States. There is a rejection of the fact that if you took these people out of the construction trades right now, a city's economy would grind to a halt.
What are the unions doing, what is small business doing and what are local agreements folks doing to change the perception that undocumented workers in the construction trades need a path to citizenship? Without such a path, we are not discussing the most important issue, I think, in the context of what's happening in Toronto.
12:50 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Ontario Construction Secretariat
The issue is huge in Ontario, and we are just in the process of.... The Ontario Construction Secretariat does an analysis of the underground economy every four or five years. It's significant. I don't have the numbers on the tip of my tongue, but it's around $3 billion a year.
This is a situation of employers who are not writing T4s to their workers, so they're not paying their EI, not paying their CPP, not paying workers' comp, not paying the employee health tax, not paying HST—all those kinds of things. It's a cash-based economy. It's primarily in the residential construction. It's not as big in the ICI sector.
It's a huge problem. It creates a downward pressure on legitimate operators, because they're paying their fair share and are bidding against these operators who are paying guys cash and can undercut them because their expenses are lower. This is a huge problem.
The unions have been waving the flags—
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Adam Vaughan Liberal Spadina—Fort York, ON
Do you support a path to citizenship as a way of rectifying this?
12:50 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Ontario Construction Secretariat
Well, some of these workers are legitimate. They're not all necessarily lacking a social insurance number.
12:50 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Ontario Construction Secretariat
I can't comment about the citizenship. I don't have any direction from my board, so I can't speak to that, but the underground economy is a huge problem that we've been waving our flags about for a long time.
Some of these operators are getting government contracts, so taxpayers are funding tax evaders. It's happening on a provincial and a federal level.
Moving that—
12:50 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Ontario Construction Secretariat
—surfacing it and moving some of it to legitimate conduct will strengthen the people who are doing their fair share or paying their fair share.
12:50 p.m.
Executive Director, Toronto Community Benefits Network
That's exactly what I was going to say as well. We support newcomers. We want to see the opportunities open up and that we bring these small businesses into the regular economy so they get to register their apprentices officially with the Ontario College of Trades and take advantage of the tax incentives they could benefit from as a result of doing that. We definitely want to see—
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Adam Vaughan Liberal Spadina—Fort York, ON
It's also an issue that their credentials aren't recognized—
