My name is Mark Lewis. I have the great privilege of being the general counsel for the Carpenters' District Council of Ontario and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.
We are a union. We represent all 16 local unions of the carpenters' union across the province of Ontario. At the moment, we have somewhere in the vicinity of 25,000 skilled men and women across the province working in all the trades that comprise carpentry as a whole. Our members work primarily in the industrial, commercial and institutional sectors of the construction industry, though they work in other sectors as well.
What I want to say has probably already been said by the speakers just before me. I cannot stress how strongly we as a union, from the workers' perspective, echo the comments that were made by the chambers of commerce about the shortage of skilled workers.
I can speak broadly about the construction industry, but right now particularly about the carpentry trades. We are at record levels of employment amongst our membership across the province of Ontario; we have a crisis now, in certain parts of the province, in finding the labour to meet the jobs. As predicted, that is going to get worse. Forecasting short-term employment numbers in the construction industry can be a bit difficult. Courts can intervene, as can planning issues, weather and financing, but over the medium and long term, we know what the trends are.
The speaker before me from the Toronto chamber of commerce referred to the BuildForce Canada labour surveys. I would commend those, both the national survey and the specific Ontario survey, to all the members of the committee. If you don't have it, let me know, and we will get it to you. Employment in our portion of the construction industry is forecast to grow by 7.5% in the next two years, and by 2.5% over the seven years that follow that. Combine that with the specific and general demographics, and we have a real problem.
Obviously, the population of Canada is aging. The number of potential recruits we have from domestic sources for our industry—we compete with every industry—is shrinking. In construction, generally we don't have the luxury or the possibility as much as other industries of extending out using older workers, because of the extremely physical nature of the job.
Our membership—and this goes to an emphasis on academic education and changes in immigration that have occurred in the last 25 years—in our union locals across the province is aging, as indeed is the membership of all the trades across the province. You can't exactly tell when our members will retire, because it's a factor of how many hours they work plus their age, but by 2030, 40% of the membership of our unions in Ontario could possibly retire. Hopefully they won't, but from trends, we're still looking at about 25% of the membership of the carpenters' union in the province of Ontario retiring by 2030.
We are the largest source of apprenticeships for carpentry in Ontario, and we are training as many young Canadians as we can get. I don't want any member of the committee to have the impression that we won't take people. We are looking for them everywhere. All of our local unions have relationships with their local school boards to try to draw people into the trades. We have relationships with the Canadian Armed Forces to try to get veterans who are transitioning out. Through our contractors, some of whom have relationships with provincial and indeed federal facilities of incarceration, we try to see if we have some people who have maybe gone wrong at some point in their lives but showed some inclination towards carpentry while they were incarcerated and might want to pursue it.
We obviously realize that the construction industry in the past has excluded certain groups or has not done a particularly good job at recruiting certain groups. We have a real emphasis right now on trying to get young women into the trades. Although it's a physical job, it has become less physical. There are aspects of carpentry that women could be particularly interested in, and we're trying to get more of them, along with aboriginal people, indigenous groups—anybody we can get.
However, there will not be enough skilled carpenters from domestic sources 10 to 15 years out to meet the need. It takes us somewhere from three and a half to six years to produce a skilled carpenter, and they are at their most productive about five years out, after they've completed their apprenticeship, based on what we see amongst our workers. That's a long time.
We need workers from overseas. Traditionally, for most of the 20th century, Canada got large parts of its skilled workforce from overseas. We stopped doing that, but we have to try to reach out.
There are particular problems with the construction industry that make us something of a problem child within the immigration system. I cannot tell you which employer is going to have a job for which worker two years from now, because I don't know which construction company is going to get the next contract to do something. However, we as an industry know we need workers. We as an industry, with our employer association partners, can predict that.
Instead of employer to employee-based immigration, we would like some consideration given to a broader, industry-based approach, with the industry associations and the relevant unions attracting the workforce. That way, all the employers can be utilized, depending on who gets the contracts. If the unions are involved, we can guard against some of the problems people have raised about lesser-skilled workers.
We'd ask you to recognize the importance of experiential-based education, as opposed to formal education through institutes of higher learning. Apprenticeship is of value and contributes to building this country.
Lastly, anticipating some of the questions that might come, if anything could be done to reduce at least the reading and writing portions of the language test for our workers, it would make us so happy. We have people working in Toronto who have worked here for two, three or four years. They earn $150,000 a year. They have no chance of passing the reading and writing portions of the test, but they're really good at building your subways and your offices. You see the work of our members on the scaffolding around this building.