Ontario’s unionized building trades, select contractors and major-project owners are stepping up their efforts to ensure Ontario’s next wave of large construction projects is fully resourced by a well-trained workforce.
Veteran Ontario construction expert George Gritziotis, executive lead of the Ontario Tripartite Labour Resource Council, unveiled the latest details of the Skilled Trade Demand Supply Forecasting Program at the Ontario Building Trades’ annual convention in Windsor last month.
The program enables forecasting of owner and contractor demands at the major-project level and drills down into the projected supply of unionized skilled trades to reduce labour-market risk.
The tripartite council is a joint venture of the Ontario Building Trades, the Construction Employers Coordinating Council of Ontario and the Electrical Power System Construction Association (EPSCA).
Addressing trade bottlenecks
“This system is an early-warning sign of potential skilled trade bottlenecks when there’s multiple projects taking place stacked on top of each other in any particular region, and the kind of data we would produce would inform owners, local unions and contractors in having dialogue and talking about potential mitigation strategies,” Gritziotis told delegates.
The system has been under development since 2023 and will include a web-based analytics and delivery dashboard, a secure web portal for client access and quarterly updates to enable inclusion of new investment impacts, Gritziotis said.
Pilot projects have involved Ontario Power Generation, Bruce Power, Scarborough Transit Connect and Alberici-Barton Malow, design-builder for NextStar Energy’s lithium-ion battery plant in Windsor.
Union participants have included EPSCA union affiliates, the Eastern Ontario Building Trades (including UA, ironworkers and sheet metal workers), Sarnia Building Trades, Windsor Building Trades and provincial ironworker and insulator unions.
Growing list
The list is growing and Gritziotis said future participants will include three more ironworkers’ locals plus sheet metal and insulators and UA locals.
Gritziotis and Building Trades business manager Marc Arsenault both said Metrolinx has become interested in participating.
Gritziotis is the former CEO of the Ontario College of Trades and was Ontario’s first Chief Prevention Officer. He was also an associate deputy minister at the Ministry of Labour.
He said there are hundreds of billions of dollars in projects currently supported by the Ontario and federal governments, and labour availability is seen as the top risk to their success. The new forecasting system will bring supply confidence, he said.
“There’s been a lot of talk about training and the importance of training, but the piece here that’s required is the sharing of information to make sure that when we are looking for predictability and precision and we’re looking to train that we’ve got the information we need to be able to make appropriate investment decisions,” Gritziotis said.
“What I’m presenting here is a tool that positions, I believe, the building trades and its unionized contractors as the reliable and consistent source of skilled trades for all major projects in the province of Ontario.”
The online system is dynamic, he said, in that new data and trends will be assessed immediately, as opposed to other systems that do not incorporate new data and become “cold” the day they are released – though he said those tools have been very useful for the sector.
The prototype now being developed takes data from owners’ scope of work and assesses the mix of skilled trades required by structure type. The information is already being shared with early adopters, Gritziotis said.
The threshold that has been established includes projects that are $300 million in value, three years in duration and employing 300 workers.
Early adopting union locals are sharing “granular” membership data, with confidentiality maintained to exclude workers’ names but including certifications, regulatory requirements, security clearances and nuclear qualifications, “anything that would get the worker to the site,” Gritzioltis said.
Other benefits will include co-ordination of apprenticeships and more precise capital training spending, he added.
Arsenault said the boilermakers have always been ahead of their peers when it comes to workforce analysis.
The forecasting tool, he said, will “improve investor, stakeholder confidence, professionalize our industry, and recognize that the organized sector is your first and best choice, one-stop shop for construction services.”
