April 2013
| Business World Magazine | 77
as in, how many people are coming through
the training system now, and how many cur-
rent workers will be able to fill those jobs via
labour mobility. After exhausting domestic
sources, they concluded that approximately
157,000 workers will have to come from out-
side the country.
“Despite our best efforts to find those
workers from the domestic pool in Canada,
we still have to rely on immigration to fill
those positions,” says Michael Atkinson,
President of the CCA.
Canada’s current fertility rate is rough-
ly 1.6 births per woman. Atkinson describes
the international rule of thumb for replacing
a country’s population as being a birth rate
of 2.1. “Simple math shows that our needs in
the labour market area are not dependent on
the normal economic cycles,” he says. “This
is not a temporary thing; this is something
that we, among other industries in Canada,
are facing because of our aging demograph-
ics, and because of our low fertility rate.”
Because of that impending reliance on
foreign labour sources, the CCA has been
paying close attention to Canada’s current
immigration systems, such as their Feder-
al Skilled Worker and Temporary Foreign
Worker programs. “We look at those and we
say to ourselves ‘Well gee, you know, they are
not exactly construction friendly,’” Atkinson
says.
GETTING WITH THE
PROGRAM
The Federal Skilled Worker Program is the
primary way a tradesperson or potential con-
struction worker can immigrate to Canada
to work – either of their own volition, or be-
cause they have been sponsored by a prospec-
tive employer. Under that program, an ap-
plicant needs to accrue 67 out of 100 points
on a scoring system in order to be eligible.
Unfortunately for the construction industry,
the vast majority of those points are awarded
for post secondary education or proficiency
in either one of Canada’s official languages.
“A lot of the tradespeople we’re looking for
probably don’t have a postsecondary educa-
tion,” Atkinson says. “They may have taken
some formalised training if they have sys-
tems similar to our apprenticeship system,
but chances are they won’t have postsecond-
ary degrees. So they already fall behind the
8-ball in trying to amass those points.” On
top of that, a lengthy queue has developed in
