Thank you.
I'm here today representing the Canadian building trades, the almost 600,000 men and women who make up our membership, creating the literal foundation of our nation throughout Canada in every province and municipality. We represent the carpenters, the welders, the steamfitters, and every construction trade in between. As much as our members rely on construction work to put food on their table, the oil and gas sector relies on the construction industry. Construction activity on an oil and gas project is a major employer of our members. In the course of a year, nearly 40% of our national membership is actively engaged on an energy project in some way.
When we talk about construction in the oil and gas sector, we're really talking about two facets. We're talking about the construction of new facilities and the maintenance of capital assets or existing facilities. For example, in 2013, which just passed, in Alberta, our trades worked approximately 21 million new construction hours in oil and gas. The industry as a whole worked about 60 million hours.
At the same time, our members worked 30 million maintenance hours in the oil sands alone, just in Alberta. This doesn't take into account any of the work in Saskatchewan, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, any of the pipeline spreads or the consumer natural gas spread going on in the greater Toronto area right now. It doesn't include any of the hours on the cogeneration facilities in Ontario, like Goreway in Milton, in the GTA, that has employed thousands of people from around Ontario.
To be frank, 2012-13 wasn't a huge year for construction in oil and gas. At the height of the boom, in 2007-08, we did more than 40 million construction hours. The decrease in projects not only affects the number of jobs coming from new construction, but it also affects the number of jobs available in the long run.
When new construction increases, job increases are not just in new construction jobs, but also in maintenance jobs. It's simple. Every project we build requires workers not just to build it, but also to maintain it. In dollar terms, every dollar spent on new construction in oil and gas means $1.50 spent on maintenance costs down the road. So jobs that begin in new construction translate to jobs in the maintenance of the project in the coming years. These aren't just jobs in oil and gas; these are jobs that create jobs. The relationship between these two facets means infrastructure development and investment in construction projects in the oil and gas industry pay huge dividends in employment possibilities for the future of Canada. If you think about it, oil and gas projects are generally not small endeavours. These are big projects that give lots of young Canadians and apprentices opportunities for employment, and at the same time mean good, full-time jobs, with benefits, to workers in the skilled trades.
Think about this. In general, every billion dollars invested by an oil and gas company in construction means at least 4,000 direct construction jobs right away, not including the secondary and tertiary job opportunities in engineering, manufacturing, the service industry, and others.
So right now as we're here speaking, over in the major project management office, there are hundreds of billions of dollars of planned investment. Think of the tens of thousands of jobs, the income potential for middle-class families, the food on tables across Canada.
If you ask me, if you ask the Canadian building trades, how a decline in the oil and gas sector would affect employment and the standard of living in Canada, this is my answer. The more we invest in resource development and the infrastructure that comes with that, the more jobs in skilled trades we create. This means paycheques, good paycheques coming home to Canadian families. This means dollars going into the consumer economy. This means dollars going back into the economy. This means a solid quality of life for middle-class Canadians, the engine of our economy.
I hope you got a sense of some of the person-hours that our members have worked, some of the person-hours that are at stake, from my earlier testimony. The economic interest of our membership in the building trades is inextricably linked to that of Canada.
Another thing to consider, we did a membership survey not too long ago in Fort McMurray. At least 45% of the workforce there today was from somewhere else in the country. Right now there are 82,000 people living in camps full-time, from somewhere else in Canada.
This means the wages earned by those workers go back home to their communities: communities like Gander, Fredericton, Moncton, Hamilton, Burnaby, Laval, Abitibi, Halifax. So the economic benefit of these projects, regardless of their location in Canada, is immense.
When you take a plane across the country these days, in all likelihood you aren't sitting beside a banker or a lawyer anymore. Chances are you're sitting beside someone in the trades going to where the work is—on an oil and gas project.
There are challenges in our industry. There are issues of labour supply. There are issues of training delivery. These are issues of labour mobility. But nothing is insurmountable with the availability of work. With this abundance of work, we have the opportunity to get these challenges right. We're more likely to get training, to get mobility, and to get labour supply right during peak times than during the slow times when there's no work to dispatch people to.
We are at a critical point in the construction trades and construction industry. For those who, like me, took political science, the mode age is the most frequent age. Right now the mode age of construction workers in my membership is 51. It's one of Canada's oldest industries, the construction trades.
This sector is one of the engines of our economy. We need a vibrant and robust workforce. There's no better way to attract young people to an industry than by jobs being available. We need to revamp our thinking in Canada about the K-to-12 education model where everyone is encouraged to go to university. We're seeing people come to us after university and community college into apprentice programs later than we ever have, with ten years of little or no incremental attachment to the labour market—that is, good, sustainable jobs with incomes that can support a family. That's what we're talking about here.
I've told the committee before that innovation in the skilled trades is about going to work. In our view, this is the most important determinant of economic success. Without a solid construction sector, there are implications for the economy, including the people Peter represents.
When I appeared previously, I talked about pipelines. Perhaps the clerk could do me a favour and enter some of that testimony into the record. There's relevant information in that study as well. I decided to keep my remarks short today so that we could get to questions and talk about some more important issues.
Thank you for the invitation.