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.
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Home Builders' Association
I would say at this point that the best way to characterize it is that it has really overshot. You can understand why. The problem is that since 2008 and the subprime crisis, there have been over 60 changes to the financial system in recent years since then. The stress test, this last one, was probably the most dramatic of them all, while the other things were compounding.
When you look at it, you see that all of this policy change is now overshot, and it's really time to adjust. The market has changed and conditions have changed. It's time to change the policy accordingly, and it's very doable.
Edmonton Griesbach, CPC
Do you have any numbers on how many people it puts out of the market and how many young people cannot afford houses because of this?
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Home Builders' Association
Overall, we're looking at about 150,000 people knocked out of the market. About half of those would be first-time homebuyers, so that's about 74,000 knocked out of the market. With the types of tweaks I described, it would bring back only about two-thirds to the market overall. It's not like you're bringing everybody back in, but it would bring back about 90% of first-time buyers, who are the people who are the lowest risk in terms of arrears and who are most affected by the changes.
Gordie Hogg South Surrey—White Rock, Lib.
I would like to share a little bit of my time with the legendary Rodger Cuzner.
I'm interested in the process we've been following when we're talking about the challenges we have in being able to get enough employment and looking at the micro level and comparing it across Canada. In metro Vancouver, certainly, we have similar dramatic challenges, if not more dramatic. We're starting to pay employees to travel. We're paying travel time and a number of other things to get them to the workplace. We have big challenges within that.
We're talking about the stress test and wanting to encourage growth, yet we don't have enough people to meet the demands. In the first part of the testimony, we heard that we don't have enough people to meet the demands that are there, and now we're talking about how to increase the demand even further.
I'm wondering about looking at a macro perspective, looking outside of here, and whether we can learn from that. Reference was made to Australia, Germany and other jurisdictions. Are there some ways to do that, given that unemployment rates are very low and it seems that the proposals are about how we fight for a limited workforce that is not going to expand? We have more retirements coming and more demands.
It looks as though the only solutions I'm seeing, from what you're talking about, are getting some externals and getting temporary foreign workers and other types of models. Do you have any experience from other jurisdictions that might help inform us in terms of how we might strategize around that?
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Home Builders' Association
I think it's important to say first of all that in the near term you are talking about competing for immigration. That is the solution that can fix things over the near term. Over the longer term, there's no question that there are opportunities to increase productivity as well. We're going to need both. We need to look at productivity.
From the perspective of the Canadian Home Builders' Association, we now have our own modular housing construction council, which looks at more factory-built housing and that kind of thing, which is purely a reaction to.... Since the Second World War, there's been this thought that factory-built housing would be the way, but the fact of the matter is that site-built construction is hyper-hyper-efficient and very cost-effective. But when you start to run into labour shortages over time—this will probably continue, and the demographics will probably support it—it makes more sense to look at more and more factory-built componentry. That's sort of the longer game, but we will have a long-term need for the workers as well, and immigration has to be part of that solution.
Liberal
Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
Thanks very much.
I've had the great opportunity to be advised by many of the faces around the table here today. I appreciate your input in the past.
Just as a 30-second history, back under the past government, Diane Finley came in as minister, took the shackles off the temporary foreign worker program, and we had more temporary foreign workers in the country. There were 200,000 temporary foreign workers in the country, when we were admitting about 150,000 new Canadians. That was out of balance.
Some headlines came. Jason Kenney came in and slammed the door shut. That wasn't the right answer either. If you read former prime minister Harper's book—I have it on my night table, and it's a good read. Right here, right now, if he could take a mulligan, it would be on the temporary foreign worker stuff. He said that the actions taken on the temporary foreign workers actually had a negative effect on wages in this country. They had an impact on wage suppression in the country.
It's a complex issue, and we have to get it right.
Mark, you indicated that the plasterers and painters are interested in building training facilities in other countries. What are they willing to do to help with accommodations and to build accommodations so that they can get some of the unemployed...? It's not just the painters and plasterers. What are we willing to do to help the 1,000 unemployed electricians from Alberta or the 800 carpenters who are looking for work in Alberta right now? We've always travelled to Alberta to get work. What can we do to help them come to the GTA now and to accommodate them? Accommodations are central, and shift management is central. What initiatives have been taken to date for those accommodations?
If anybody wants to weigh in, please do.
General Counsel, Carpenters' District Council of Ontario
I will answer the question, but I just want to make sure everyone's clear on what I said earlier in response to a question about whether we are willing to bear some of the costs. When I say “training”, what our associations are willing to do is to make sure that people have the basic health and safety, WHMIS, and working at heights certification training courses that they need to step on a construction site in Ontario, in Toronto, and that they get that overseas during the period when they're waiting to come to Canada so that they can hit the ground running. I'm not talking about training carpenters from somewhere else.
We have urged the government to consider some form of income tax relief for the expenses of construction workers who travel to their work, and in particular—
Liberal
Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
You mean mobility tax credits, and we'll get them to get those in the next one, but what have you done about accommodations?
General Counsel, Carpenters' District Council of Ontario
—in this case, the GTA.
Liberal
Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
What have any of the organizations done about accommodations?
General Counsel, Carpenters' District Council of Ontario
Do you mean where to put people up to live?
General Counsel, Carpenters' District Council of Ontario
As far as I know, they have done nothing.
Liberal
Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
If you're living in Grande Prairie and you've been out of work for eight months, you don't want to relocate to Toronto, especially the way the Leafs are playing now, but you would come for three months and then head back to Grande Prairie, or go in cycles. What's industry doing to help with that?
By all means, jump in, guys. We're looking for a solution.
Chief Executive Officer, Ontario Home Builders' Association
I can tell you that home builder members who are searching for skilled trades, as part of their regular negotiations with people coming over, will look for accommodation opportunities. Whether that is providing them short-term housing.... The real question becomes how long those skilled tradespeople, that skilled labour, is coming in for. Are they coming in just for the season? Is it their intention to stay there long term? Those are some of the arrangements that are being made. I think that's a key piece of this, in terms of what the home builder members are doing.
I would also say that nothing really counts until the playoffs.
General Counsel, Carpenters' District Council of Ontario
I'll answer that in terms of the ICI, and to a certain extent I'll flip the question back to you.
A lot of the ICI construction, the infrastructure construction that's going on in the GTA, is government funded. For the Eglinton Crosstown, one of our major transit initiatives, we need 100 carpenters on the stations. We can't put them up. This is for a station. This is not a subdivision. These are the—
Liberal
Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
But carpenters build shit, okay? Carpenters build stuff. Tradespeople build stuff.
Liberal
Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
You guys have pension funds that you can invest in infrastructure, and it would only make sense to me that you could invest in some type of accommodations, in partnership with governments, whatever the government of the day is.
I'm challenging you guys to come up with something other than, “Well, what's the government going to do for me?”
