Human Resources Committee on Feb. 21st, 2019

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, colleagues. Good morning to our witnesses. Those were great presentations.

I'm going to give most of my time to the parliamentary secretary, Mr. Vaughan, but before I do, Mr. Bronk, I have one quick question for you.

With respect to trades, do you see resistance at times in particular trades to apprenticeship training?

I'm from Saint John—Rothesay, which is a very industrial riding. One issue I see at times is that there's a resistance to taking apprentices, because some of the trades are concerned they'll take their jobs, which is almost the reverse of the case.

Do you see that up here at all?

[Robert Bronk]

You're saying that older workers don't want to see—

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Yes.

[Robert Bronk]

You know what? That's really a short-sighted vision, because the reality is if you're getting new workers in, they're contributing to your pension fund.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

But do you see that?

[Robert Bronk]

Very little. Very little.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Thank you.

I'll give the rest of my time to Mr. Vaughan.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

I'm going to follow up on that line of questioning, because local benefits agreements have been an extraordinarily important tool to tackle youth unemployment in Toronto. In the riding I represent, we have a job site, the Alexandra Park revitalization, that's rebuilding a community of 600 public housing units, and almost 70 young people have been enrolled into the trades at one point along the way.

The biggest complaint we hear is that while union leadership is very strong on apprenticeship and very strong on local benefits agreements, when the young people are on the job site, the rank and file consider it babysitting, and young people are sometimes subjected to some pretty tough behaviour on the part of the rank and file. How do you make sure the rank and file move with the union leadership on this, which has been very strong, to make sure that the workplace is a secure and safe place for diverse, especially young diverse, enrollees?

[Rosemarie Powell]

In addition to the consultation that we did, we also, through funding from the Ontario government, underwent a process of research and development to look into the issues that under-represented groups are facing, not only in terms of getting access to the trades, but also once they're in, in terms of their experience and whether they feel welcome, as if they're in a place where they can actually learn, grow and thrive. In that research, we did get a lot of negative feedback about their experience and about some of the very same issues that you raised.

One thing came back as a really important solution to help address that. Obviously, it's a community, a labour and industry partnership, so we're always trying to find solutions together to how we can address the issue. Mentoring came up as a big need, and that's why we developed the NextGen Builders program, for black youth especially. Now we're expanding it to support women. By the way, that's with federal funding, so thank you very much. This is about journeypersons supporting an under-represented worker and welcoming them and having a structured way—

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

You referenced that it's easy to support your brother's kid; it's much tougher to support someone down the street and around the corner.

[Rosemarie Powell]

Absolutely, and we've been working with the unions to do that. We just got started. We have 35 mentees in the program and we have over 25 mentors, journeypersons from the different unions, who've already expressed interest and registered for the program, and we expect it to grow.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

I would assume local benefits agreements are critical to making sure that support is centred around communities that are experiencing work opportunities.

[Rosemarie Powell]

Absolutely.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

In terms of the unions, you've done great work as a group, but one of the things we heard from the member for Hamilton was that some of the unions aren't experiencing shortages of labour or personnel and others are experiencing extraordinary ones. In light of the fact that it requires a significant amount of time to get highly skilled tradespeople into the process—apprenticeship alone is not going to meet the needs quickly, and over the short term it's not going to meet the needs quickly—how critical is it for us to reassess our immigration strategies to prioritize, and prioritize in real time, bringing in people with those highly skilled trades and settling them in to the workforce as citizens and permanent residents? How critical is that to making sure the immediate short-term needs of the labour shortages are addressed?

[Robert Bronk]

That is a complicated issue. Our experience has been that there aren't a lot of skilled tradespeople immigrating to Canada. Most of the immigration is not coming from countries where they have a formalized apprenticeship program. We're not getting immigrants from Germany, where they have probably a more advanced apprenticeship program than we do in Canada. We're not getting waves of immigration from Germany or countries that have this. A lot of the immigration is coming from countries where the education levels are lower than those in Canada, so I'm not too sure that is a solution. There might be immigrants who want to come and enter the construction trades as an occupation, but I don't think there are a whole lot of skilled tradespeople who are waiting to come to Canada.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

But would it be easier to graduate people who have construction experience into the process than it would be to start from a standstill?

[Robert Bronk]

Definitely.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

If you, for example, targeted welding, there are different categories of welders, obviously, so bringing in people with basic welding experience and graduating them up would be a lot easier than trying to find people who have no welding experience whatsoever.

[Robert Bronk]

That's exactly right. It is complicated. With immigration there are a lot of cultural things too. Depending on the country they're coming from, in many cases construction is the lowest of the low occupations, where you're general labour and you have no education and that's what you do. When people come to Canada and they say they don't want their kids in construction, they don't realize that to be an electrician, you have to have your grade 12 physics, your grade 12 math and you have to be university level in high school. They don't see that. There are some cultural things. The parents aren't aware that you can't be—excuse me—the dummy of the class. It's not, “You should go into carpentry; you're not academically—”

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

They should go into politics.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Robert Bronk]

Yes.

[Rosemarie Powell]

Could I add one little thing to that?

[A voice]

Yes, please.

[Rosemarie Powell]

Thank you very much.

Notice in my presentation that I said 1.2% of racialized people are registered in the Ontario College of Trades. The term there is “registered”.

There's a whole heap of people right here in Toronto and Hamilton who are actually working in the underground, doing construction work. They are experienced workers. We have a lot of small businesses. There is a whole heap of subcontracting that happens within the industry. There are a lot of minority subcontractors and contractors who could, if they knew about tapping into the benefits of becoming unionized contractors, or the benefits of registering their apprentices with the Ontario College of Trades.... We could tap into a more skilled labour pool right here and now with the people we currently have in our local communities.