Human Resources committee  While I have the microphone, just very briefly, I would encourage all of you, when you have a chance, to look at tab 11 of our speaking notes. You can see the kind of outreach we're trying to do. This is a women in construction initiative. It's run by our union with partners who

Human Resources committee  Ah, now you ask a question that's near and dear to unions' hearts: when you get to the money. We as an industry...and I know this from the commitments our employer associations have; Mr. Yorke will back it up. It's we as an industry; unions don't have money. We get what we get fr

Human Resources committee  Yes, we would agree with the proposition that you've just put. From our point of view, we would like a GTA pilot or immigration change, however it is, that focuses on a person's actual ability to integrate into Canadian society and become a productive Canadian, like all of us, in

Human Resources committee  Yes, that is a problem. We would love some form of action by the federal government in terms of giving incentives—a tax break or however you want to call it—in terms of being able to write off certain expenses to try to get workers to come to the GTA. The carpenters' union has lo

Human Resources committee  No, we're talking about skilled labour. We're talking about carpenters who can go to work and who we can put to work at a full journeyperson rate tomorrow morning, at a total cost to the employer in excess of $50 an hour because of the skill and the productivity they have. That's

Human Resources committee  Is it undocumented workers we're talking about here? That's a somewhat different question from where we are in terms of the immigration system. Clearly, and I'm not telling tales out of school here, there is an issue with respect to undocumented and under-documented workers, in

Human Resources committee  —and if we could bring them into the system, I would love to do it.

Human Resources committee  Yes.

Human Resources committee  Is that for me? I don't know—

Human Resources committee  For the trade of carpenter we are very lucky. Full carpenters are in a high enough NOC group that we can get into various programs for the fully skilled carpenter. The problem we have with these workers is that even though they are in a high enough NOC group to qualify for certai

Human Resources committee  Yes.

Human Resources committee  What we would look to, as we see the model, is a union and employer association-sponsored program to bring in workers—you say the temporary foreign worker program is tainted, so I won't use that term—for a period of time and let them work flexibly across our industry. An employer

Human Resources committee  I'll defer any questions to later.

Human Resources committee  Thank you for the opportunity to speak again on Parliament Hill about an issue that is near and dear to the hearts of carpenters across Ontario. We are a union that has 16 local unions across the province. We are the largest single source of apprenticeship in the trades in Ontari