Parents blameless

Re: “Labour pains,” Editorial, Dec. 6.

Please don’t blame the parents for being biased against the trades. Most parents today don’t use tools or teach trade skills, because their parents were in the trades and they did not want their children to have to suffer being in a trade, so they encourage them to get a degree.

Getting laid off when the jobs dried up, having to work in a cold and dangerous environment, long hours and being dirty all the time makes being in the trades a hard sell.

Until the trades start making more money than a degree in Alberta, you will see a shortage of tradesmen, but that’s not going to happen, because the guys making the deals all have degrees and they don’t like to share — they missed that class in university.

So to get kids into the trades, people need to stop looking down on their mechanic under their SUV. Instead of buying their kids more computer games, they could buy them tools, move the SUV out of the garage and build a birdhouse, or better yet, help out on a volunteer project in the community.

I’m lucky — my dad made me do work and I sometimes hated him for it on Saturday mornings. He may not have had a degree, but he can fix anything and still supported a family, and I’m so thankful he did. People ask me all the time how I know how to fix stuff, and I tell them my dad showed me.

Randy Chomistek, Calgary