Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee this morning and talk about labour availability challenges in the construction industry.
My name is Sean Strickland. I'm the executive director of Canada's Building Trades Unions, and I'll be sharing my time with Mark Ellerker, the business manager of the Hamilton Brantford Building Trades Council. I'm going to give the committee a few suggestions on some policy changes that may help with labour availability in the construction industry. Mark's going to talk about how policy impacts workers in their community in real time.
At Canada's Building Trades Unions, we represent 600,000 workers and 14 affiliated unions right across Canada. As you know, the construction industry is unique. Projects arise, projects get built, and then they wind down and workers are often subject to layoff. This happens at different times in different regions across the country requiring different trades. It creates labour shortages in some areas and surpluses in another, because construction projects don't happen in uniform right across the country.
Because of that, the construction industry needs unique solutions to address labour availability. We have few suggestions.
One is a skilled trades workforce mobility tax deduction. Currently, skilled trades workers aren't afforded the same treatment under the Income Tax Act as other workers and can't deduct work-related expenses from their income. This creates a barrier to having to travel where the industry needs workers.
A second is cross-border [Technical difficulty—Editor] across North America. We know that training qualifications for many of our trades are near identical on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border. Therefore, it makes sense to allow members to travel back and forth across the border to address labour shortages. This is something that cannot currently happen.
The temporary foreign worker program is part of a short-term solution, but it has to be reformed. One suggestion we have is allowing unions that are interested to become the designated sponsor for the temporary foreign worker. This will ensure that workers are treated fairly and that we can leverage our hiring hall system so that temporary foreign workers can be put to work on a consistent basis and be provided a pathway to citizenship.
The government also needs to work with local labour market experts, like building trades councils, that best understand the local market. For example, the 2015 version of the labour market impact assessment asks specifically if a union has been consulted about the hiring of a temporary foreign worker. In 2021, on the recent version of the form, that question was deleted. It's important that building trades councils are consulted when temporary foreign workers come into an area.
Lastly, it's important that there are massive challenges right now [Technical difficulty—Editor] a construction pilot program that would target 10,000 workers from somewhere in various areas across the world to have a construction immigration pilot project, where we can attract workers to Canada, provide them with a pathway to citizenship and meet our labour shortage.
With that, I'll turn it over to Mark.
Thank you.