Good morning, committee. My name is John Cartwright. I'm the president of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council representing over 205,000 women and men who work in every sector of the economy. I'm a construction worker by trade, having started as a carpenter apprentice at the age of 18. I'm here to support the amendments that are contained in Bill C-227.
We feel that the billions of dollars in investment that's about to be made through the federal infrastructure program serves a multiple purpose.
For the last two and a half years, the Toronto Community Benefits Network, which I co-chair, has been working with the Government of Ontario and Metrolinx to create a community benefits model for the $8 billion of construction in the Toronto transit lines. That really focuses on ensuring that the prosperity that will come with that investment is shared adequately in our community, particularly among those who sometimes have been left out of prosperity in past economies. We're looking particularly at historically disadvantaged communities, equity-seeking groups, and military veterans to be included in the apprenticeship opportunities in that work as well as in the white-collar side, the professional, administration, and technical work unique in North America to ensure that graduates and internationally trained professionals can get opportunities for employment.
To create that model, we brought people from the United Kingdom, from the United States, and from British Columbia into a meeting to talk about the different experiences that had been involved in those different jurisdictions in community benefits. There are now over three dozen community benefits agreements working on major infrastructure programs in the United States.
We think we have it right. We have a whole series of commitments through the trades in Toronto to reach out to diverse communities to help engage people from diverse communities to come into our industry. We've already had several hundred young people from those different communities come into the trades, and with the Eglinton Crosstown, we anticipate hundreds more coming into those trades.
This is not a simple task, but we look at mirroring what happened around the health and safety agenda in the construction industry in the past decades. Originally when we created a health and safety regime under Bill 208 in 1990, there were some on the employer side among supervisors and contractors who were resistant to embracing those elements, but three decades later, there's not a major contractor in Ontario that doesn't talk about the importance of having a full health and safety regime as part of its culture. We believe that is a transformation we can do within the construction industry across Canada by helping to change the openness to first nations people, to newcomer communities, to young people, and to youth at risk, to ensure that they actually have a chance to have a decent career.
A similar parallel is really to be made around green construction. I remember when LEED was first brought up as a possible goal for building, and it was very much a small marginal effort at the time. Today there's not a major contractor, architect or engineering firm in Canada that doesn't have LEED specialists on its staff in order to achieve those goals, and every major project is trying to reach some form of LEED standards, including platinum when it can.
We believe that kind of transformation is possible by tasking the construction industry with embracing community benefits, by looking at the major projects that the federal government will invest in, and by making those choices.
We are going to spend billions of dollars. We have crisis levels of youth incarceration in first nation communities across this country. The Globe and Mail today talked about that being 25%. We have a crisis of young people in greater Toronto falling into violence and gang activity. The alternative, instead of spending money on prisons or on the health crisis of diabetes in first nations, is to spend the money on infrastructure and to make sure it gives double value, that is, by creating the infrastructure that our country needs for the 21st century and also by creating the job opportunities that so many young Canadians need in order to be part of a growing industry, and to have a career in an industry that values apprenticeships and training, that gives people portable skills they can take with them for the rest of their lifetime, an opportunity I was fortunate enough to have at the age of 18.
That's my presentation, and I'm happy to answer questions.