Don’t kill the College of Trades

Abolition would be a mistake and disrespectful of employment potential

Without apparent prior notification or public consultation, the Ford government has tabled Bill 47, which contains an appendix repealing the Ontario College of Trades and Apprenticeship Act, 2009, subject to royal assent. The repeal is preceded by a number of interim alterations to the college. However, the government’s statements do not indicate prospects for the college’s retention, in altered form or otherwise.

In 2007, I was appointed by the province to examine and report on essential elements of the trades system in Ontario. During the consultation leading to my report in April 2008, I met with interested labour, management and public representatives on six sites across the province and received more than 111 written submissions from stakeholders.

The mistaken view of many was that “trades” involves only the construction industry. In fact, there are four distinct trade sectors; construction, industrial, motive power and service. My analysis and recommendations covered all four key sectors.

My essential overall finding was that there was an urgent need to provide a new, working structure, one that enabled labour, management and the community at large to collaborate to ensure that the trades segment of our economy was operating at peak performance in terms of both worker and public safety and economic output.

I concluded that four objectives were required to be met in order to achieve these goals. First, that maximum productivity is a shared target of both management and labour. Second, that there is a joint commitment to ensuring the health and safety of the workers, apprentices, journeypersons and supervisors, as well as the trades’ clientele and the community at large. Third, that there is in place a competent and welltrained team of enforcement officers to ensure the mandatory provisions of the act are met. And fourth, there is active communication of the importance of the trades system in our increasingly complex and technological working environment, focusing particularly on graduates to eliminate any optical, societal misconception that entry to the trades is in any way an inferior career choice.

My report concluded that these objectives could best be achieved through the creation of a College of Trades. The recommendation was accepted, the legislation enacted and for the last five years, the college has been in operation. While initial governance issues have arisen, all are fixable.

The enabling statute complied with my basic recommendations, which may be summarized as follows:

a trades membership college should replace the then existing bureaucracy-dominated legislation;

the college’s management should have the authority to appoint expert management/labour/public panels to consider applications for compulsory certification and to periodically review apprenticeship/ journeyperson ratios;

the college should develop and implement ongoing, effective enforcement policies, aimed primarily at ensuring the safety of all involved;

the college should engage in muchneeded ongoing economic analyses of the four trades sectors, and provide prospective employee applicants and the public at large with information on the critically enhanced status of the trades system in our economic growth environment.

To be clear, I recommended that the college’s conclusions on major issues, including compulsory certification and ratios, be subject to the responsible minister’s review and regulatory concurrence. As I read the statute’s provisions on college, ministerial and lieutenant government regulations, this government oversight recommendation has been adopted as well.

As is well known, many other professions’ operations — teachers, physicians, lawyers and others — have their controlling bodies created by or recognized in provincial or federal legislation. To revoke the College Act implicitly indicates that the Ontario government does not accept that the trades sector — management and labour — constitutes a similarly important professional sector.

It is my deeply held hope that Bill 47 will not result in the destruction of the college. At the very least, what is surely now required is a good-faith undertaking on the part of the Ford government to initiate a full and open consultation with the trades sectors, with the college administration and with the public at large to determine what further action is necessary to ensure that a fair and effective college-led trades governing process is in place. The alternative, as I see it, is the real risk of sectoral chaos, with serious negative safety and economic consequences.