The time to worry about recruiting and training young tradies was about a decade ago. You can’t make a bunch of kids into 10+ year skilled journeymen in 3 or 4 years, and unless employers are forced they’re going to continue fighting over the most experienced employees and leave the apprentices to rot without an opportunity to be trained.
Industry and government should have taken this seriously when it was brought up years ago that there was a big generation drop-off in most trades, but it looks like someone tossed that mess down the later-tube and now, it’s later. They should have been mandating mandatory apprentice ratios in workplaces years ago, instead of letting apprentices be used as labour and then fail their exams due to not being taught their trade.
Just starting an electrical apprenticeship in a couple weeks. I’m very interested to see how this plays out. Seems to me like there’s a lot of complaints on both sides between “nobody wants to hire apprentices” and “nobody wants to work anymore”. From my experience in hospitality, I feel like there’s a feedback loop of people don’t want to invest in real training because they feel those staff are just going to move on and staff keep moving on because there’s no room for advancement within an employer so they have to jump somewhere else to get ahead. I imagine a similar thing happens lots of other industries.
Which kind of mandatory apprentice ratios are you thinking of? Many trades have a cap so you can’t hire more apprentices without first bringing in more journey persons to train them. If you mean the other way where a place would actually have to be bringing in apprentices, I don’t think that’s practical unless you can perpetually grow your business exponentially as those apprentices are being trained.
The inability of gov’ts to foresee and act upon basic lack-of-housing data - which has been available for decades - gives me little hope anything will change … no matter who is in power.
When we accept refugees (which is a good thing) then force them to live on the street because of a lack of afforable housing, we are as evil as the nations they are escaping from.
Gov’ts are filled with stupid, myopic politicians who only care about their own power. It’s time to change the formula for how we elect good people to office.
We are literally starring at the brink of the 2nd middle ages where the rich held all the lands and all the power and the rest are just serfs. And we are all powerless to do something about it.
I mean governments have various things they can do. Push hard on cities that are blocking construction through obstruction or sloth. Prioritize tradesmen as immigrants. Use the powers of the federal government to create a national vacant unit registry so that lower tiers of government don’t have to run vacant unit taxes on the honour system. Allow single-stair multi-unit dwellings. Fund rental construction like they did before Chretien/Martin. Reduce the requirements to get your trade papers (apprenticeships are good but 5 years before your electrician papers seriously???)
It’s just that governments would rather argue about bullshit. Ford is focused on the fucking Ontario Place spa. Poilievre and Postmedia are flinging shit about bail reform. The CBC is, as ever, up its own ass about complete obscure nonsense. Trudeau is a fountain of empty nothings, as he has been since he lost Gerry Butts. Jagmeet is talking about the housing issue, but only in ways to throw more money at buyers and renters to juice demand in a supply-side shortage, which is basically subsidizing landlords.
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