Team Canada Strong must help apprentices reach the finish line

Canada has made a major commitment to skilled trades training.

Through Team Canada Strong, the federal government is proposing to invest $6-billion to help with the recruitment, training, and hiring of up to 100,000 new Red Seal trades workers over the next five years. The goal is ambitious, necessary, and welcome news for sectors that employ skilled tradespeople.

Canada needs qualified tradespeople to continue building housing, expand infrastructure, strengthen manufacturing, support energy projects, and deliver the major investments being promised across the country.

But before we recruit even more workers into the skilled trades, we need to ask if our apprenticeship system has the capacity to help those workers finish their apprenticeships.

While apprentices spend most of their time at work gaining hands-on experience and earning the required technical hours in their trade, they’re also required to complete in-class technical training through a college, polytechnic, union training centre, or approved training provider.

The problem is that while registrations of apprentices continue to grow, certifications are not keeping pace. In 2024, more than 101,000 Canadians registered as apprentices, but fewer than 47,000 completed their apprenticeships.

Fewer apprentices are reaching certification within prescribed timelines, suggesting we need a better understanding of where delays occur along the pipeline from registration to completion.

An apprentice may have a great employer, put in their thousands of hours of labour, and still get stuck waiting if the next block of technical training they need is full. They could wait months for a seat to open, or travel elsewhere for training.

The CWB Foundation has heard concerns from post-secondary institutions and apprenticeship training partners about waitlists, instructor shortages, rising training program costs, and limited visibility into training availability. These insights are not yet nationally representative, but they do raise concerns about our collective ability to graduate apprentices in a timely manner.

Team Canada Strong represents welcome steps toward building Canada’s skilled trades workforce. To carry that momentum, governments should partner with trainers, employers, and labour groups to better understand apprenticeship capacity and flow. Specifically, they should look at wait times for required training, gaps in regional trade capacity, recruiting and retaining instructors, available training spaces, and the cost of delivering programs, which are more expensive per seat than general programs.

The announcement already proposes significant funding to modernize apprenticeship training, and address the barriers that prevent apprentices from completing. A dedicated portion of that investment should be directed toward the capacity and progression problems identified through the review.

That could mean expanding technical training seats in regions with long waitlists, helping institutions recruit and retain qualified instructors, improving co-ordination among training providers, or giving apprentices clearer information about where courses are available.

The review must be tied to action. Its purpose should be to give governments the evidence needed to allocate funding quickly and strategically. Most importantly, Canada can connect Team Canada Strong’s recruitment targets to a funded plan for helping apprentices reach certification.

We know what’s at stake. Welders build our infrastructure, support advanced manufacturing and energy sectors, conduct pipeline maintenance, are building the next generation of vehicles critical to defense and automotive sectors, and so much more. And there’s significant demand for welders in specialized fields like shipbuilding, mining, and robotics, which are on the rise.

Canada’s industry needs to recruit more welders, as well as retain and retrain individuals with the requisite skills for a strong economy. It can encourage more young students and career changers to explore welding and other skilled trades. However, wanting to build a career isn’t enough to build Canada’s skilled trades workforce. People need to start an apprenticeship, access technical training when required, and complete their certification.

As Canadians, we’re in it to win it, and Team Canada Strong presents an incredible opportunity to do just that. But before we use the number of people entering the trades as a measure of success, we need to grasp how many can successfully navigate the apprenticeship system, and facilitate their timely and successful progress.

That is how Canada can turn a major investment into the skilled workforce it needs.

Susan Crowley is executive director of the CWB Foundation.

The Hill Times