Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to share our views with the committee.
As stated, my name is Patrick Dillon. I'm a business manager and the secretary-treasurer of the Provincial Building and Construction Trades Council of Ontario, which is an umbrella organization representing the building trades, the individual trade unions here in the province that speak for the construction workers in this province.
The first thing we would do in talking about our industry is to talk a little about the characteristics of the industry in that it's cyclical in nature. There are booms and busts from time to time, depending on the economy. Those booms and busts sometimes are province-wide and sometimes they're wider, broader than that on a national basis.
There are also times, particularly in a province like Ontario, where the boom and bust era is in a regional area, not necessarily in the whole province. In fact, as we speak, we are experiencing that in the province of Ontario; the areas of Toronto and Ottawa are quite busy. You have areas like Hamilton, some here in the Kitchener area, where the manufacturing sector has been coming down. That impacts dramatically on construction. We also have Thunder Bay as a soft area for employment in this province. Windsor is another area where there is unemployment. It just talks to the issue of the boom and bust.
The other issues that come up that describe our industry are that the employers and the workers are mobile. We move around not only from province to province, but we also move around from region to region, and within a region we move from job site to job site. The nature of the construction workplace is that the workplace itself is temporary in nature. We are probably the only workers in society that the harder we work the sooner we're out of work. That is what our industry is all about, and we accept that and work with that.
Getting into speaking about the temporary foreign worker issue, I would state up front that the building trades in general are pro-immigration. We do not oppose immigration; we do not oppose automation. We try to be fairly progressive, but we do have concerns around immigration, temporary foreign workers, and undocumented workers, and we'll address that.
On the temporary foreign worker issue, we think that Canadians, the Canadian government, and provincial governments need to have more of a focus on ensuring that Canadians, Canadian youth, and Canadian underemployed youth have an opportunity to be trained. Well, I'm talking about in this province, but I think in the province and in the country. I believe that, particularly for our industry, if youth are given the opportunity for the training, they will come forward and take the training.
Just as an example, I'll use my own trade. I'm an electrician by trade. They were opening up to hire 75 apprentices in the Hamilton area, which, as I said, is an area where there's fairly severe unemployment. When they put their advertisement out to hire the apprentices, to advertise the positions for the apprentices, they had 75 positions and they had 1,800 applicants with the one day of advertising, and it wasn't a really broad advertising that they did.
So it tells me that there are youth available, and youth will take those opportunities if they're given. We have to make sure, and there has to be insurance in place, that the unemployed and youth coming out of universities, colleges, and high schools are given an opportunity to work in the trades.
The use of temporary foreign workers to fill long-range needs in training I think would be a travesty for the construction industry, for the whole economy in Canada. If you think about temporary foreign workers, they are, just as it states, temporary. They will come in, and the work we need them for—if that's part of your long-range strategy in using temporary foreign workers—will probably outlast the length of time the temporary foreign worker wants to stay. So if you haven't hired the apprentices and you've brought in temporary foreign workers to take the jobs, and those temporary foreign workers leave and the people never had an opportunity to get into an apprenticeship, you create a major void.
I would make reference to Professor David Foot, from the University of Toronto. I heard him speak at the Alberta Building Trades Council Convention in Alberta, in the last year. That's exactly the message he was giving the large industrial players in the province of Alberta, that if you're using temporary foreign workers to meet a peak demand, that's fine, but for the long-range plan of training, you need to give Canadian youth and Canadian underemployed youth the opportunity; then go to the long-range plan on immigration, and then the temporary foreign worker.