On April 30, I joined industry leaders for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s announcement outlining the Spring Economic Update’s goal of training 100,000 new trades workers over the next five years.
He dubbed the initiative as “Team Canada Strong” to describe a nationwide workforce intended to deliver major projects, housing and infrastructure. The announcement carries several policy implications worth unpacking.
First, the prime minister is clearly signalling to private-sector unions he intends to help unlock major new projects — projects where their members can build and work.
The announcement followed a recent address to Canada’s Building Trades Unions. Consistent with that message, Carney emphasized union jobs, praised union training models and framed unions as key partners in skills development.
This union-centric framing is likely to remain a recurring theme in the months ahead. Alongside the rhetoric, he also reiterated several policy and investment commitments from the Spring Economic Update.
According to the Prime Minister’s Office news release, the package centres on four themes: recruitment, training, hiring and apprenticeship completion, and delivery.
- Recruitment: Invest $2 billiob in paid placements that lead into apprenticeships and launch the Build Canada Apprenticeship Service to match apprentices with employers and provide up to $10,000 toward first-year wages.
- Training: Commit $331 million over five years (plus $18 million ongoing) to modernize training and accelerate Red Seal certification — digitizing exams and logbooks, introducing a national apprentice number and expanding the Union Training and Innovation Program to upgrade union training centres.
- Hiring and completion: Provide $3.4 billion over five years (plus $468 million ongoing) to reduce barriers to completion, including a $5,000 Red Seal completion bonus and a $400/week top-up during in-class training (this brings the subsidy up to $16,000 for the year, in addition to EI).
- Delivery: Offer end-to-end support, target a 50 per cent reduction in certification time, and co-ordinate with governments, Indigenous partners, unions, business, and the CAF — backed by a total $6 billion investment.
The financial top-ups will be welcomed by employers, unions, contractors, workers and apprentices alike. The more consequential development, however, may be the proposed Build Canada Apprenticeship Service (BCAS).
It signals the creation of a new federal delivery vehicle and a larger federal footprint in the trades. That raises an immediate question: how will BCAS interact with existing provincial agencies, boards, consortia and training service providers that already perform many of these functions?
In the same announcement, Carney has also emphasized respect for provinces’ primary role in education; depending on how it is designed, BCAS could be seen as testing that principle.
If the goal is to reduce red tape and make it easier to enter the trades, it is fair to ask whether creating a new, federally funded agency is the most direct route — or whether BCAS could be integrated with, or built to complement, existing provincial systems (for example Skilled Trades Ontario).
It is also unclear what level of provincial and territorial consultation informed the program’s design. Carney’s release acknowledges working with the provinces. But how engaged were they in the development of this “Team Canada Strong” initiative?
If provinces were not meaningfully engaged, the “Team Canada Strong” framing risks reading less like a pan-Canadian partnership and more like a federal–industry initiative. Or, more pointedly, a Carney-industry initiative.
Carney’s branding “Build, baby, build,” to borrow his phrase at the announcement, positions him as a champion of major projects.
And to be clear: the renewed emphasis on the skilled trades, the restoration of key apprenticeship supports and the new top-ups are positive steps. Still, the announcement did not appear to reflect broad provincial buy-in. In practice, many Canadians will care most about results, more workers trained and more projects delivered.
But execution matters as much as ambition. If the federal government builds a parallel national structure that attempts to speak for provinces and territories, the risk is more bureaucracy, not less. Provinces should engage early to ensure alignment and keep the focus where it belongs: on workers and apprentices.
Stepping back, this is an opportune moment to enter the trades. Politically, every major federal party is working harder to earn labour’s support, and elections are increasingly decided at the margins.
That gives trades workers, unions and employers meaningful leverage. The industry should use this window to press for practical, ambitious reforms that improve entry, completion, mobility and certification, especially reforms that are deliverable in partnership with provinces and training providers.
It was encouraging to see the prime minister reverse his predecessor’s trajectory of cutting apprenticeship supports and to recommit advancing the skilled trades. But without productive alignment with provincial and territorial counterparts, “Team Canada Strong” could be perceived as “Team Carney.”
That would serve neither the policy objective nor the politics — and least of all the aspiring trades worker.
Wellington Advocacy is a national public affairs firm. Benjamin Lamb serves clients through Wellington’s Ontario Business Line, specializing in labour advocacy. Send Industry Perspectives Op-Ed comments and column ideas to [email protected].
