Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning, committee members. My name is Bill Ferreira. I am the executive director of BuildForce Canada. As was already said, I'm joined here today by Mr. Bob Collins, who is our senior economist. We greatly appreciate this opportunity to assist you with this study, and we look forward to our participation.
As background, I feel it's important to point out that BuildForce Canada is not an industry association. We are an industry-funded research organization. We do not engage in policy advocacy. That role falls to our strategic partners. With the support of the Government of Canada, we strive to provide the construction and maintenance industry with balanced and timely labour market information to help the industry carry out labour force development and training. We work with industry stakeholders across the country to assemble and validate our numbers. Many of these stakeholders are here today and will also be presenting.
With regard to your study, we have pulled together a brief slide presentation to assist you with your analysis. It is included in the package that was distributed. It focuses specifically on the greater Toronto and Hamilton area and some of the numbers we are seeing. That was drawn from this year's forecast.
Suffice it to say the construction industry has seen dramatic growth over the past 20 years, nearly doubling in size since the early 2000s. Over the next 10 years, we see much more moderate growth, only growing about 3% from 2018 levels. However, several provinces will exceed that level. B.C. is expected to grow at about 9%. Alberta is also expected to grow at 9%, but that's after 2022. Ontario is expected to grow at 3%, but there will be pockets in Ontario where we anticipate that growth is going to be much higher, such as southwestern Ontario, which we anticipate will be about 8%, and central Ontario at about 6%. The greater Toronto area is expected to grow at about 2%, but that's on top of record-level construction activity today.
Nationally, we see 260,000 workers retiring between now and 2028. That's 22% of the current labour force. In the greater Toronto and Hamilton area, 43,500 workers are expected to retire over the next 10 years. That's 23% of the 189,500 workers currently employed in the 34 trades that we monitor. When coupled with demand increases, this means the region will need to hire 50,000 new workers between now and 2028. Even if we are successful at recruiting younger workers at the current levels, that's still going to leave us with a gap of nearly 14,500 workers by 2028. That means those 14,500 workers will need to be recruited from outside the region's labour force, from outside the province, from other industries or from outside the country.
Retirements will also contribute to higher levels of labour force tightness. We saw some of this in 2018. These are early signs. The unemployment rate in July 2018 reached 1.3%. Just by way of a comparison, in 2007, when Alberta was experiencing a significant labour crunch in the construction sector, the lowest the unemployment rate reached in Alberta was 1.7%. We are well beyond that. Effectively, everyone who can work right now in the construction industry province-wide is working.
Not surprisingly, employers are struggling to find the workers that they need to continue to proceed with their projects on time and on schedule. Over the next seven years, we have identified at least 36 billion dollars' worth of major projects that are stacking up on top of, as I said, already very high levels of construction activity.
A smaller labour force plus increased demand is going to continue to exacerbate the problem for the foreseeable future. Some relief may come after 2022 as eastern Ontario and northern Ontario demand will moderate somewhat, but those workers will be pursued by other regions of the province, as well as, as I said, British Columbia and Alberta. All it will take is a slight increase in demand here, and in our forecast, we haven't factored in RendezVous or whatever the successor project is to that. That could very easily change the mathematics.
There are a couple of solutions that we would like to take a look at. Short-term solutions really are greater mobility, and not only mobility between the residential sector and the non-residential sector, but also within the province, moving the labour force around within regions, and at times and as necessary, drawing in workers from other provinces.
In the longer term, the industry needs to maintain its commitment to apprenticeship. As a percentage of registrations, the industry in Ontario has exceeded the national average for apprenticeship completions over the past five years, but more in this area can be done. Greater employment support for apprenticeship development is something that you may wish to consider. Sixty per cent of the construction businesses are micro-businesses, and that's fewer than four employees.
Most of the current incentives in apprenticeship development are directed at the apprentices themselves. Apprenticeship is a partnership. Without an employer, it doesn't matter how many grants you direct at the apprentice. If that apprentice can't find a job, they're never going to be able to take advantage of those grants. One area that you may want to take a look at is how you can better create incentives for smaller construction employers to participate in apprenticeship.
Another area that you may wish to take a look at is the federal skilled trades program. The foreign-born population in Canada accounts for about 22% of the total population. In Ontario, it's about 29% according to Stats Canada. Just over 70% or 2.7 million people of Ontario's 3.8 million foreign-born population live in the Toronto area. The construction industry is made up of about 26% new Canadians. Clearly, there is room for improvement with respect to our recruitment of new Canadians into the industry. Part of that challenge is that those new Canadians that are available in Toronto didn't come here to work in the construction industry. Really, the only program that directly brings in immigrants into the construction labour force is the federal skilled trades program.
One of the easiest ways to try and help alleviate the situation in the city of Toronto is to focus your efforts on trying to increase those numbers. Currently, I think that about 1,875 workers are brought in annually under that program. If you were to increase those numbers, we could certainly do a much better job of bringing in the workers that we need.
I think I'm almost at my seven minutes, so I'll leave it at that.
I'm happy to take any questions that you might have.