International Trade Committee on April 21st, 2016

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

You mentioned the aboriginal population and the many young people we can probably train. Do you think that the $8.4 billion that we put in the budget for indigenous communities will help from that perspective, or do you think the government should be doing more to attract that young population into the main stream?

[Sudhir Sandhu]

Going back to the notion of demographic dividend, when any nation, any economy has access to a growing, young workforce, if you engage them through training and educational opportunities and get them into the workplace, that's decades of advantage to the economy.

Leave them on the sidelines and we know what has happened in a number of developing nations where there is a young workforce that never got to participate. Canada faces those same challenges on a microscale.

The programs are there. Now we need jobs. There are training opportunities. There are educational opportunities extended through both provincial and federal programs. If those don't translate into jobs, then these young workers will be sitting on the other side of the fence looking in.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

On the other hand—I'm a professional engineer and land surveyor by trade—it's going to open up markets for technical people, whether they're architects, engineers, or surveyors. Do you see a positive coming out of that for those technical and tradespeople working in other countries?

[Sudhir Sandhu]

In our experience, it's to a much limited extent. Canada has not had a history of projecting its workforce in large numbers into other economies. Yes, we do sell technical skills and high-end engineering skills, etc., but we do not send plane loads of people to work on projects overseas. We never have. Canadians haven't been conducive to that.

We're much more at risk, especially given the federal programs now, with a very extensive infrastructure program that is going to be launched. There is going to be much greater demand in Canada, concurrently with a significantly laid-off workforce that's ready to take on those jobs. If we do anything to disrupt that....

Construction has one of the highest multipliers in the economy at about 1.7. Those dollars make a difference. When our middle-class Canadians are working, they can buy homes, they can buy cars, and they can invest in goods and services, exactly as the presenters sitting beside me are offering to them. They can educate their children, and they can even put away a little bit for retirement. The more opportunities like that we take away, the less it is in Canada's strategic interest.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Thank you, sir.

That wraps up your time, Mr. Dhaliwal.

We're going over to the Conservatives now.

Mr. Ritz, you have five minutes.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the presenters.

There is a common theme on the agricultural side that of course these trade deals are good, because they build our capacity to diversify our trade portfolio. Not everyone eats the same cuts. In Canada we tend to eat the top end of the beef. Then we look for markets for the rest of it, the offal and a lot of the secondary cuts and so on. I see this as very important in that diversity, and of course that builds capacity at home, with jobs and so on. I'm just doing a little bit of a synopsis there.

When it comes to the trades, Mr. Sandhu, I couldn't agree with you more. I was a building contractor to pay for my farming habit, and I hired a lot of tradespeople. We internalized our costs too. We weren't a union shop. We did work on union sites. We paid dobie dues and so on.

I'm curious as to how you internalize your costs any differently than I do when it comes to your workforce. When they're off the job and going back to school, they still cost me, the same as they do you, but now there are EI programs that take care of some of that. How is your internalization of those costs any different from mine?

[Sudhir Sandhu]

I'll give you a local example. In Manitoba the unionized construction industry and the unions that I represent have five training centres. Last year we spent over $4.5 million on training. The non-unionized construction industry has none. That's the comparison.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Well, they use community colleges and technical institutes and so on.

[Sudhir Sandhu]

Again, those are primarily market-driven and publicly funded. We agree; everyone has a different business model. The union industry has achieved its competitive advantage through investing more in training and development.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Sure. Absolutely.

[Sudhir Sandhu]

It leaves it at a relative disadvantage when it comes to pure, straight-up cost. We're absorbing a cost by operating five training centres, very large training centres, in Winnipeg and the surrounding area that our competition simply does not. If we can get greater access purely on that surface-level cost advantage to non-Canadian participants, I just don't see how that results in a happy circumstance for either you, in your circumstance, or us.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

All right, fair enough. I totally agree with you that the training is key. You look at the difference in the trades in the last 20 years, and everybody is a specialist. It's no longer just hiring a carpenter, but now they're finishers, and framers, and roofers. Then it varies depending on whether you're doing domestic construction—homes, and so on—or commercial, because now you're switching over to steel and finished drywalls, and it's a whole different deal. There is certainly a lot of training required for that.

I think that speaks to the inability, in a lot of cases, of construction sites to bring in people who are prepared, like TFWs, as you say. Of course there are three streams of TFW, and a lot of them get mixed together. The low-skilled like waitresses, hotel workers, and those types of things, come and go. The trades are more on the professional side. To come in to this country to work on a job, they have to have the certification from the country of export, I'll call it, to show they're up to that standard. We're very intolerant of people bringing in just a guy with a shovel when there's a guy who's needed and who has plumbing skills.

I think there's a bit of a misconception that somehow TPP is going to open the doors to floodgates of untrained labour that's going to push you out and push me out. I have to go back to a real job some day, so I'm very cognizant of that. I know there are some in the oil patch, but again they're low skilled, and not the higher skilled who would supplant you.

[Sudhir Sandhu]

I would tend to agree with you. I think the real risk is to quintessential middle-class Canadian jobs. When you're talking about entry-level, low-skilled employment, as we grow as an economy—and every economy as we industrialize—we stop doing the rudimentary things that are entry-level economic activities. We develop, and we grow.

It's the same thing with the labour workforce. As we grow, and as we educate and develop our workforce, they tend to do higher, more value-added work, sometimes leaving a gap. Those things happen in every advanced economy. What we see—

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Construction ebbs and flows. It's seasonal. There are all kinds of things that enter into it.

[Sudhir Sandhu]

Absolutely.

You have to be responsive to those. We think that from time to time TFW programs have helped, but this is a different ball game.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

How much of that could be alleviated if we had better access interprovincially? I know there are huge barriers when it comes to the trades moving from province to province. My son is a welder. He took his training and began his apprenticeship in Saskatchewan, then moved to the Alberta side for the oil patch, and he had to start all over again, which is ridiculous. You are burning iron either place. It makes no sense at all. How do we, as a federal government, lead the provinces to come to that realization that labour mobility is key?

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Can you give a very quick answer?

[Sudhir Sandhu]

It's a jurisdictional issue, but initiatives are under way to address exactly the question you raise.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

We're going back over to the Liberals now.

Ms. Ludwig, you have five minutes.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you, and thank you to the panel.

I'm going to follow along the same train of thought as Mr. Ritz's question.

My son is working on his block 4 in carpentry, and we hear consistently throughout the college network in Canada about the challenge for tradespeople in travelling and working interprovincially.

In terms of there being an opportunity and a ground afoot to work on that, whether it's CETA or in this case the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, will the timing of the negotiations interprovincially come into play and have the right fit in preparation for TPP's being ratified?

[Sudhir Sandhu]

I'm sorry. Are you talking about the timing of provincial ratification of the same agreement?

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

No. The provincial agreement, interprovincially, for—

[Sudhir Sandhu]

The interprovincial trade agreement.... It is, as I think Mr. Ritz mentioned, a slow-moving process. They've made some good progress out east. Some of the eastern provinces have now negotiated harmonized requirements.

I'll give you an example. Sometimes there are really absurd differences that lead to inefficiencies. In Alberta, I believe it was four cycles of four weeks each for in-class training. In Manitoba, it was just a number of weeks. How they structured it was marginally different, so someone who had completed one year in Manitoba couldn't easily transfer into Alberta. Those are the kinds of things that are being harmonized.

I can't comment on the pace of it. Again, in a process like this, we are a very vested and interested party, but we're not driving the process, so I can't in fairness answer your question in terms of how the timing will work out at the end.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you.

Referring back to the Standing Committee on International Trade in the 41st Parliament in June 2015, a number of the witnesses commented on the challenge of trying to hire international labour, saying that because of the paperwork and the requirements it wasn't as easy as it sounds. Could you speak to that?

[Sudhir Sandhu]

Again, we have a reasonably formed apprehension that it will become easier as time goes by.

Under the much stricter stringent guidelines that we had previously, we had a case of a Chinese mining company operator wanting to bring in some 400 workers. They had managed to bring a fair number in already. There was a practice, for example, of posting Mandarin as a job requirement. There was clear evidence that they had rejected qualified Canadians.

Under the very tight guidelines that we had previously, we had a lot of slippage in terms of how things worked. If we're easing the restrictions, it stands to reason that it will be easier than it has been. That's why we're here before you today. There's a real impact on hard-working, middle-class Canadians. We need to protect against that.