Transport committee  Good morning, Chair, members of the committee and fellow witnesses. Canada's Building Trades Unions represents 500,000 skilled trades workers across Canada working for construction companies large and small. We have 250 training centres funded by member and contractor contribut

Transport committee  I'm Chris Smillie. I work for Canada's Building Trades Union.

International Trade committee  CETA is largely a goods and services agreement. There's no component of labour mobility in the skilled trades in CETA. If you're looking at doing that, let's talk. You previously asked me a question about shortages. I'm sorry, I didn't answer it. We're going to have 200,000 re

International Trade committee  If it's a foreign company that's doing a big infrastructure job, such as Union Station, for instance.... That was a partnership deal with a Canadian company, but when a foreign construction company comes and does a job in Canada, they take their money back home to where they're f

International Trade committee  That's a British company, I believe. They split the deal with the Canadian Construction Association, but Carillion's portion goes back to the head office of Carillion. This is the danger with the infrastructure spend. We're going to have $200 billion or so. How much of that is n

International Trade committee  Internationally, Canada and the provinces need to negotiate mutual recognition agreements in the skilled trades if they wish to have some semblance of foreign credential recognition of our trades. Within Canada, we have the Red Seal program. Mr. Wayland talked about that. Appren

International Trade committee  I think we fix North America first. I think we work Canada, U.S., and Mexico with the same contractors, the same purchaser of construction, the same energy companies doing business in all parts of the jurisdiction, and then we look to Europe. I think that's a natural fit. I'm no

International Trade committee  It seems like a world away to go to do business in Japan. Japan has some of the largest construction companies in the world, and my personal gut feeling is that PCL or EllisDon probably wouldn't win a bid in Tokyo for a long, long time. They have a much better chance of expanding

International Trade committee  Add the skilled trades to the NAFTA visa occupations.

International Trade committee  Yes. The U.S. isn't too excited about renegotiating the NAFTA occupations. We got that message from the White House. Start there, and mobility would be improved between Canada and the U.S.—

International Trade committee  Nobody knew the U.S. was out until the document was released by New Zealand in November, so that was a surprise. I'm not trying to rebut your question in any way, but because of the nature of how it was negotiated, nobody knew the U.S. was out. That was the key point. The U.S. tr

International Trade committee  There is nothing stopping that kind of thing. The only issue with something like that in terms of workers is that the workers have to originate in the country that we've signed a side deal with. In terms of contractors, it might end up being a Spanish country, but in fact we'll

International Trade committee  Sure. Once you sign a trade deal like this, it is good forever and always. There's no ability to go back to the trading partners and say, “Oh, by the way, we're getting negative feedback from Canadians and there are job losses associated with this. We want to change this, and we

International Trade committee  We'd hope so, but we have an enforcement problem as it is in many of the jurisdictions today.

International Trade committee  What I would say is that safety is about training—