Evidence of meeting #139 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 workers.
A video is available from Parliament.
General Counsel, Carpenters' District Council of Ontario
I'll give you a brief answer.
Liberal
Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
If you want to get back to it afterwards, we could have the chat then.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bryan May
I'm not cutting you off because of the language, but anyway....
MP Falk, please.
Conservative
Rosemarie Falk Conservative Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK
Thanks to all of you for being here today.
I want to touch on this. My riding is in Saskatchewan and is very close to Alberta. What we see all the time in Alberta is that for a lot of people who live in Calgary, Edmonton, Red Deer or Lloydminster, or even in Saskatchewan, such as Swift Current, when they go to work, they go to camps up north that are built by the companies. They have housing, accommodation and cooks. They're being fed. There are rec rooms.
Literally, they live for a week in camp. It's something interesting, I guess, if you're looking at encouraging workers to head elsewhere, even for people from Atlantic Canada. I've spoken to many different operators who live in Newfoundland. They come up for their two weeks and then go home for two weeks. That's the lifestyle they've chosen, and it works.
I want to ask this of Ms. Nord. You had mentioned a decline in economic immigrants coming into Canada—
Director, Skills and Immigration Policy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
No, into Ontario.
Conservative
Rosemarie Falk Conservative Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK
Into Ontario. Is that in reference to just skilled workers or is that in general?
Director, Skills and Immigration Policy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
No, that's the economic class. The lion's share of immigrants do come to Ontario and, arguably, to major urban centres, but it's the type of immigrant who's coming.
Conservative
Rosemarie Falk Conservative Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK
It's the type of immigrant. Okay.
This is for anybody. Do we know what types of skilled trades are coming in? BuildForce, I think, mentioned the federal skilled trades program. Do we know what types of skilled trades workers are coming in with this program?
Executive Director, Ottawa Office, BuildForce Canada
No. I don't have the specific breakdown of which individual trades.
Conservative
Rosemarie Falk Conservative Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK
Okay.
There's something else I want to know about. We're talking about TFWs and immigration, and I do believe that immigration has a piece in this, but I also believe that this has been slow coming. We're at this point somehow. We've heard a lot from our previous witnesses about education. Our youth aren't being encouraged and taught about the trades. Yes, I understand that we have this problem and we need to fix it now. Is it possible to fix it now, today? I don't know. It has taken a while to get to here.
What is industry doing to encourage youth, to encourage our primary and secondary school kids? Even in a previous study this committee did, we learned that we have all these students going into university, getting educated all the way up to a master's degree, being unemployed, getting sick and tired of being unemployed and going back to school and getting a trade. What is industry doing to curve this the other way?
President and Director of Public Affairs, Carpenters' District Council of Ontario
From the perspective of the carpenters in Ontario, and actually nationally, we really have done a lot of outreach with the school boards. As I mentioned earlier, with every school board in the GTA, both Catholic and public sector, we have training partnerships. We bring in young people each year. As I've said, a number of them can take the last semester in grade 12 with us. They do three or four months with us and then in the summertime go out onto the job site as a first-term apprentice. In September, they can make a decision. They go back to university—
Conservative
President and Director of Public Affairs, Carpenters' District Council of Ontario
For probably about 15 years.
President and Director of Public Affairs, Carpenters' District Council of Ontario
I would say that absolutely it's working. Also, as Bill has alluded to in terms of women in construction, if you come to those classes we run, you'll see that, out of 100 students, about 50% are women.
Getting women into construction is a huge challenge for the whole industry, and I would suggest that for us it's a best practice. It's something that we're trying to extrapolate across Canada. Working with the school boards is the way you bring young women into the construction industry. They start their apprenticeship trade the same as any young man does.
General Counsel, Carpenters' District Council of Ontario
I want to stress what it means to me. Is it working? It works well for those students who sign up for their OYAPs, Ontario youth apprenticeship programs. By grade 12, it's often too late, and that's when we start getting them. We have to encourage the value of the trade all the way through, certainly through high school education.
For example, in this city, Ottawa, the school boards have stopped teaching carpentry. Our local here in Ottawa, Local 93, has developed a program to try to get schools in Ottawa to try to teach carpentry so that young people might be interested. We're trying to draw them out. It works when we can get young people into our training centres across the province. We have to move back....
Somebody asked about what we can learn from other countries. Ask our training instructors. When they go to Germany to look at their apprenticeship systems, everyone across Germany universally refers to the profession of carpentry. I don't think there are too many people in this room who talk about the profession of carpentry. It's a challenge to all of us to start talking to young people and everybody about the value of those trades and to get them in early.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bryan May
Thank you very much. I'm sorry, but that's time.
We're going to have time for probably one more round of five minutes each, but I have to move to MP Duvall for three minutes.
Hamilton Mountain, NDP
Thank you.
Going back to the apprenticeships, you made a very, very good point. I know when I was younger, when I went to high school, you could go the academic way or you could go into construction. It would start off at grade 9. Grades 9, 10 and 11, you went into the shops. My understanding, as you just said, is that it's too late now. The education system has gotten out of that.
Have you talked to our provincial counterparts about that, and are they willing to make any kind of adjustments?
General Counsel, Carpenters' District Council of Ontario
Yes, we talk to them all the time. They stress that they want to emphasize skills training, the trades, apprenticeships. It's an ongoing problem, and I'll tell you this. Every guidance counsellor in every high school in this province went to university. Virtually none of them did an apprenticeship. That's the sort of uphill struggle you face in the school system.
President, Ontario Home Builders' Association
I went to university to be a phys. ed. teacher. I'm a push-up and chin-up major, and now I run one of the fast and upcoming construction companies in Kitchener-Waterloo. I did that because the dream that my parents were sold was: “You're going to come to Canada. You're going to work really hard. You're an immigrant. You're going to save up and you're going to put your son through university because that's the Canadian dream.” And it was a great dream, except that when I graduated and paid my $40,000 of tuition, I had no job. What helped me pay for university was the great construction industry and the skills that I learned there. Until we change that stigma—and that stigma comes from every single one of us in this room here—it doesn't matter.
As I said, I've been involved with the school systems for over 20 years. It's a drop in the bucket. It's a great drop in the bucket—don't get me wrong—but we have to do more to get it back in the school systems earlier. We have to bring the prestige back to the trades, because as I said, you can make a widget, and the next day that widget's gone. We build a home. We build the communities. We build dreams where people live every single day, and not enough of that is said.
Hamilton Mountain, NDP
Do you feel that for the future we're meeting our requirements for apprenticeships, or do we see those falling for the future?
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Home Builders' Association
I can jump in on that. No, the numbers are not going to bear out.
We've been working in schools for decades against the system and the culture of Canada because of exactly what Rick talked about. We need to change. We need to have a parity of esteem. We need people to respect both sides of the equation, and frankly, to points made earlier, right now you go get a university education and you end up having to become a skilled tradesperson anyway. We need to teach people to not waste those 10 years and to get into it right now, because there are huge opportunities.