Construction labour crunch leaves Canada in need of boosting ranks of home builders

Canada is growing rapidly — and so are its housing needs.

In turn, these pressures are testing the construction industry, which finds itself dealing with a mounting labour shortage.

There are tens of thousands of unfilled construction jobs across the country — including up to 20,000 open positions in Ontario alone — that the Labourers' International Union of North America (LiUNA) says it could fill, if only it could find the workers.

The open positions in such sectors as residential and high-rise construction include labourers, bricklayers, cement finishers and people doing trim and tile work.

"That's just one labour union," said Victoria Mancinelli, the public relations director for LiUNA in Central and Eastern Canada, describing the deficit as a partial snapshot of the broader construction labour crunch.

The industry is also facing a looming wave of retirements that will see roughly 20 per cent of Canada's construction workers retire within 10 years.

"This is not something that is unique to construction," said Bill Ferreira, executive director of industry group BuildForce Canada, referring to the labour supply challenges that surround Canada's aging workforce.

To keep construction projects moving forward, Canada will need people to build them — which is why both the industry and various levels of government are paying close attention to how many workers will be available to work on job sites now and in the future.

"It's mission critical to get more people into the trades," Ontario Labour Minister Monte McNaughton said in an interview.

There are parts of Canada where the construction labour shortage is projected to be more acute than in others, and Ferreira said demographics are at the core of those regional differences.

"It's almost an east and west story," he said, noting that Prairie populations skew younger, which is advantageous for recruiting construction labour.

BuildForce Canada expects the number of pending retirements in Alberta, for example, to be nearly balanced with new recruits from the province through 2032. But even more people will need to be hired to deal with the demand for construction over that time period — and officials have signalled the province needs more construction workers now.

Ferreira said the exception in the west in British Columbia, which is expected to see 38,000 of its veteran builders retire by 2032. But local recruitment is predicted to fall thousands short in terms of the total number of new workers.

In Ontario, more than 80,000 people will exit the industry over the same time period. That's a problem in a province that is aiming to build 1.5 million new homes by 2031. The actual number of workers needed will be significantly higher than the number retiring.