Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be speaking to you today.
Monsieur Gattuso and I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak about the national supply chain task force's report. We are proud of the work the task force did over its 100-day mandate. Our objective was to provide independent advice through recommendations on actions aimed to increase competition, access, reliability, resiliency, redundancy, efficiency and investment in the national transportation supply chain, while also promoting continued international transportation services to and from Canada.
The recommendations developed are based on the perspectives shared by industry through consultation and written submissions. We were also guided by the principle of creating a transportation supply chain that would be governed and operated in the best interests of the country, given Canada's reliance on international trade for our prosperity.
With respect to the objective of the TRAN committee, today we will share what we heard from industry about the labour shortage impacting the national transportation supply chain and the recommendations related to addressing these challenges that we provided to the Minister of Transport in our final report.
One of the key structural issues identified through our consultations with industry is that the transportation sector is facing acute labour shortages. While they are an issue for all transportation modes, they are particularly problematic for the rail and trucking sectors. To give some perspective on the scale of this issue, as noted by the Conference Board of Canada, the transportation sector is more reliant on older workers compared to the total economy, and more than 260,000 of its workers will be retiring in the next 20 years. Moreover, from 2021 to 2030, the number of workers joining the transportation workforce will be insufficient to offset the losses from retirees.
The transportation sector relies inordinately on immigrants, and its current workforce is predominantly male. We heard that the labour issues facing our supply chain system are complex and cannot be tied to a single broken cog in the system. A mismatch between available and required skills, lack of appropriate training programs and insufficient training funding were consistently raised as significant concerns by various supply chain representatives. They also mentioned lack of awareness of certain occupations as being particularly problematic.
Labour shortages are a pressing issue across all sectors. We have seen that when the transportation sector is not functioning properly, products do not make their way to consumers, materials do not make their way to producers, and notably the follow-on impacts affect all Canadians.
A key example of this dysfunction is that 50% of our trade is dependent on trucking, and we are missing more than 25,000 drivers. Further, there is not a collective view that trucking is a skilled trade, which dissuades potential candidates and impacts training funding. Trucking is just one example of the system not being set up to effectively attract and retain talent.