Importing tradespeople is just part of the solution
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s announcement that a new stream for skilled tradespersons will be introduced on Jan. 1 is a welcome and long overdue enhancement to Canada’s immigration system.
In the mid-1970s, when I was working as an immigration officer in the Canadian Consulate in Birmingham, England, the vast majority of applicants were skilled tradespersons. In 1967, Canada had introduced what was at the time a revolutionary point system to assess immigrants. The original system allowed journeyman tradespersons to obtain enough points to qualify for immigration fairly easily. As a result, large numbers of tradespersons immigrated to Canada and, to a great extent, have provided the plumbers, electricians and carpenters who have built our houses and kept our industries running for the past half century.
Canada, of course, produces its own skilled tradespersons, but, having been able to rely on the flow of immigrant tradespersons, we have never developed apprenticeship programs on the scale required to support our needs. This has been brought home clearly by the shortages that have developed over the past two decades as immigration of skilled tradespersons has declined and the generation of postwar immigrant tradespersons is now retiring.
Why have the numbers of immigrant tradespersons declined? As usual, there have been several factors involved. Factors beyond Canada’s control included the increasing prosperity in Europe, which traditionally had been the source of many of the skilled trades. In 1975, a carpenter in the U.K. might have earned $7,500 a year, but could earn double or triple that amount in Canada. By the 1990s, the wage gap had closed and tradespersons were not so motivated to leave Europe. Furthermore, as the European Union developed, labour could move freely from country to country, whereas someone wanting to move to Canada needed to go through a rigorous and expensive process to apply for immigration.
However, a factor totally within Canada’s control is our immigration selection system and, over the years, the point system has been modified to place more emphasis on university education and less on apprenticeship and on-the-job experience. As a result, by the 1990s, it had become almost impossible for apprenticed trades to qualify for immigration as a federal skilled worker under the point system.
The emergence of the provincial nominee programs that allow the provinces to select immigrants to meet regional labour market needs was in response to a chorus of discontent from the western provinces, led by Manitoba in the mid-1990s. The western provinces argued, correctly, that the immigration selection system was failing to meet the needs of the growing western economies where blue-collar trades were in increasingly short supply and pushed the federal government to allow the provinces to recruit immigrants to meet these needs.
In response, the provincial nominee program was introduced, as a pilot project, in 1998, and now accounts for more than 15 per cent of Canada’s immigration. Over a similar period, the proportion of skilled workers selected under federal programs has declined from over 50 per cent of immigrants to about 35 per cent in 2011.
The new skilled trades stream will make the federal program relevant and accessible, once again, for skilled tradespersons. It will establish criteria appropriate to the education and experience required for skilled trades and set language requirements at a reasonable level. A carpenter need not be able to speak English or French at the same level as a university professor, so long as he or she can communicate effectively with an employer or customer.
Like the provincial nominee program, introduced 14 years ago, the skilled trades stream will start small with intake limited to 3,000 applications in the first year, but given the need for skilled trades in Canada, we can look to this stream becoming a major part of Canada’s immigration program in years to come.
However, Canada needs to learn from its past mistakes. We must not complacently rely on the immigra- tion of skilled trades as we did in the latter part of the last century. Canada needs to enhance its own apprenticeship programs and educate young Canadians and their parents to regard the skilled trades as worthy careers. A judicious balance of immigration of skilled tradespersons and training of our own young people is required.
The federal government has finally introduced a program to increase the immigration of skilled trades and the provinces now need to do their part by increasing the opportunities for apprenticeships in Canada.