Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plans to build housing and infrastructure nationwide are threatened by a potential shortage of construction workers, according to a new report from Deloitte.
The report, released Wednesday, projects that Canada will need to mobilize half a million skilled trade workers by 2030 in order to meet its goals, and as many as 800,000 workers by 2034.
The roughly 410,000 to 520,000 new workers needed to meet construction goals given the current workforce doesn’t factor in 270,000 construction workers expected to retire in the next decade and who will need to be replaced.
“Investments in training and productivity boosting technologies and creating the incentives for employers and people who are doing the apprenticeships will be very important,” said Trevin Stratton, Deloitte’s global lead for economic consulting and an author of the report.
The findings come a month after Carney announced five ”nation-building” projects designed to kickstart the Canadian economy suffering under the weight of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs. The projects include small modular reactors at Darlington’s nuclear power plant, another phase of the LNG Canada facility in Kitimat, B.C., and the Contrecoeur Terminal expansion of the Port of Montreal, among other things.
According to Justin Sherwood, chief operating officer of the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD), the more pressing challenge will be keeping the existing workforce, which he fears will exit the industry if the current slump in home sales continues.
“It’s taken us 30 years to build a workforce in Toronto that’s capable of building 35,000 homes a year,” said Sherwood. “If you’ve gone to train up electricians and carpenters for residential construction and they come out and they can’t find work in those areas, they’re going to leave the industry. And then we’re back to square one.”
Sherwood says he is doubtful of the federal government’s “ambitious” housing plan to double Canada’s rate of residential construction to 500,000 homes a year over the next decade, saying “we’ll be lucky to stay in the 200,000 range.”
Stratton points to the more than 40,000 construction sector job vacancies, a number he says is near a historical high while unemployment in the construction sector remains low.
For Stratton, coordinating project timelines will be important to avoid the “perfect storm” of labour demand for specific skills as well as other machinery and equipment, especially since provinces won’t be able to recruit workers from other regions in order to fill employment gaps, like they have in past.
“When there was all this demand for labour in (Fort McMurray), they were able to tap into the labor market in Atlantic Canada to alleviate some of that,” said Stratton of a skilled trade worker deficit in the Alberta oil sands in the 2000s. “If we’re doing nation building projects in various regions of the country at the same time, each of those regions are going to need those workers.”
Tricia Williams, director research at the Future Skills Centre, said she worries about how people entering the workforce will be able to navigate the “labyrinth” of bureaucratic structures designed to train new workers or upskill existing ones.
Williams emphasized the need for adequate support for people just entering the skilled trades in the way of mentors, child care, and a financial safety net to buy things like tools so they don’t drop out of long apprenticeships.
“We need support them through it and make sure that they’re not dropping out so they can go take a job at Walmart to pay their rent.”
Williams is more optimistic about the push to train workers, pointing to federal investment six years ago that can be built upon.
“We’re not starting at zero,” she said. “There’s good momentum, and what we need to do now is actually support people.”
