Build, baby, build? Not without more workers

Mark Carney’s “build, baby, build” agenda is facing early headwinds.

Indigenous groups are bringing legal challenges against efforts to sidestep their rights. Environmentalists are sounding alarms over new fossil fuel infrastructure amid ever-worsening, climate-induced wildfires and floods. And, all the while, Trump’s tariff tantrums south of the border are shaking and straining the broader Canadian economy.

There is another obstacle that isn’t getting much attention, but it could prove to be the ultimate downfall of the Liberals’ infrastructure dreams: a lack of skilled workers.

Workers are often taken for granted. They are treated as a bottomless resource and squeezed to their limits by profit-minded employers. But the bottom line is that productivity of any kind requires skilled workers, and a nation-building agenda requires an awful lot of them.

There are more than one and a half million construction workers in Canada, but the number is not keeping pace with demand. A fifth of the construction workforce is expected to retire within a decade, and not nearly enough new workers are being brought in to replace them. Apprenticeship registration levels are in the same place they were a decade ago. Only 20,000 new Red Seal apprentices—a nationally recognized standard for more than 50 designated trades in Canada—are certified each year.

BuildForce Canada projects a 100,000-worker shortfall by 2034 based on current trends. But the shortfall will be significantly larger if Canada hopes to achieve its ambitious new infrastructure goals, especially in the labour-intensive field of housing construction.

While the Carney government has acknowledged a waning construction workforce, its proposed solutions fail to address the structural nature of the problem. Offering an $8,000 grant to new apprentices and a $15,000 retraining grant to certain workers, for example, assumes that the up-front cost of training is the main thing holding back new tradespeople. But even though financial incentives may get some new trainees in the door, the bigger barriers—especially when it comes to keeping workers on the job site—are cultural and institutional.

It’s no secret that women are under-represented in the trades—they account for only five per cent of on-site construction workers—and it’s not for lack of training incentives. It’s a similar story for Indigenous and immigrant workers. Harassment and discrimination remain rampant, and that drives good people out of the industry.

Making the skilled trades more attractive and safe for under-represented groups is not merely an equity issue. White men now account for only 38 per cent of the Canadian workforce, down from half in the 1990s. Trying to grow the construction workforce out of the same shrinking demographic is doomed to fail.

A separate issue is the lack of employer support for training. Canadian companies spend $240 per employee on training every year on average, far less than their international peers. Even if Canada’s colleges and training centres, mired in funding cutbacks of their own, manage to attract enough prospective apprentices to the classroom, there are not enough employers stepping up to give those apprentices the on-site training they need to complete their qualifications.

Solving this challenge means moving beyond hands-off financial incentives and treating workforce development as a vital component of industrial strategy.

In the same way that the federal government talks about nation-building projects, it should be talking about a national plan to recruit, train and retain workers in strategic sectors. It will require culturally sensitive program development, investment in public education and stricter requirements for employers to support apprenticeships and to ensure safe and respectful workplaces.

It will also require the federal government to get its hands dirty. Aligning current training with future workforce needs is not something the market will do on its own. And if the private sector is dragging its feet, the government should step up with public works programs that can accelerate workforce development at a sufficient scale in alignment with major projects in the public interest.

Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood is a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

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