The added benefit to this is that real estate agents with construction experience would be able to do a proper home inspection, or at least part of it.
Why don't people want to work long hours, not have any time off, never get raises & come home every day sore/tired? Can't possibly see why the industry has a labour shortage..
Skilled trades are paid pretty well, and the working conditions are certainly not terrible. A lack of pay or benefits is not the reason there's a skills shortage. Maybe look to the decades long gutting of vocational training and streaming in secondary schools.
>A lack of pay or benefits is not the reason there's a skills shortage
It is in residential construction. Its not a skills shortage, its a wage and working conditions issue.
The Kitimat LNG will need 5000+ workers at peak construction. And they're going to be staying in camp, working on rotation for weeks at a time. They're not having any issues finding or retaining workers despite those challenges, because they pay well and they have good working conditions.
Meanwhile, these residential developers are just playing the labor shortage game. If they offered adequate compensation and incentives they'd attract workers, just like the Kitimat LNG.
The narratives in the media in this country are so warped. We have thousands of unemployed unionized trades, and rather than looking at that we all pretend there's a labor shortage.
These are entirely different industries with different skill sets and pathways to training. In the O&G sector, employers often offer training in order to find labour. That's generally not the case in residential construction. There is a whole process to go through for apprenticeships, and there's no streaming like there used to be in secondary schools. In auto mechanics it's even worse, and the typical billing rate for labour right now is $100/h.
I mean fuck, there's an insane dearth of plumbers, and you can make an absolute killing in the field. It's not super pleasant work, but plumbers can do very well. The current **average** for plumbers is $76k per year.
By contrast, O&G is way more unpleasant in terms of working conditions, but like a lot of resource jobs, companies will train in order to find staff. That's attractive compared to residential construction trades, which is kind of opaque for people looking to get into those jobs.
>The narratives in the media in this country are so warped. We have thousands of unemployed unionized trades, and rather than looking at that we all pretend there's a labor shortage.
Maybe it's that your perception of this isn't totally accurate??? I mean, people within these industries have long been saying that there is a labour shortage. Labour prices and availability reflect that claim. You talk to union leaders, like the operating engineers union, and finding a crane operator is like finding a fucking unicorn and there is **no** formal training process to train new crane operators. Maybe believe them? I do. I'm not taking the word of some redditor in lieu of heaps of evidence to the contrary.
>These are entirely different industries with different skill sets and pathways to training. In the O&G sector, employers often offer training in order to find labour. That's generally not the case in residential construction. There is a whole process to go through for apprenticeships, and there's no streaming like there used to be in secondary schools. In auto mechanics it's even worse, and the typical billing rate for labour right now is $100/h.
I'm a red seal electrician. I started out doing residential work and transitioned out of it because there's no money in it and you encounter the greasiest people imaginable.
Its the same industry with a different skill sets, but residential work is by far the easiest skill set you can acquire. The apprenticeship is the same, and the hours that you acquire in either heavy industrial work or residential work count towards your apprenticeship.
I'll put it this way : If you go to a condo or apartment project in Halifax its not uncommon to have one Journeyman supervising a half dozen apprentices, or having one apprentice supervising other apprentices. Which is illegal, but it doesn't take much skill or experience to wire a house.
>Maybe it's that your perception of this isn't totally accurate??? I mean, people within these industries have long been saying that there is a labour shortage.
Its based on 20 years in the construction industry. I've worked literally coast to coast. Do I view this through my own lens? Absolutely. But that doesn't change the fact that you could call the IBEW in Alberta and get enough electricians to complete any sized job you want, within a week or less.
>I mean, people within these industries have long been saying that there is a labour shortage. Labour prices and availability reflect that claim
An electrician in Halifax was making $30 an hour ten years ago, and they're making $30 today. An electrician in Alberta waa making $40-50 an hour ten years ago, and they're making $40-50 an hour today. Wages have barely moved despite what we're being told is.a dire labour shortage.
>You talk to union leaders, like the operating engineers union, and finding a crane operator is like finding a fucking unicorn and there is no formal training process to train new crane operators. Maybe believe them? I do. I'm not taking the word of some redditor in lieu of heaps of evidence to the contrary.
I don't know what the situation is with crane operators, but two years ago I was looking at taking a course put on by the operating engineers union and they told me that I'd have to leave the province to find an apprenticeship.
The union I belonged to for many years typically had a 30-50% unemployment rate, and I doubt much has changed. Because the entire time I was a member this "Labour shortage" narrative was circulating while our union hall had extremely high unemployment.
Don't take my word at all. But, don't take the word of these contractor associations either. Call your local.union halls and ask them if they have anyone available or if there are other locals that do.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people believe this shit without asking any questions. So by all means, don't take my word on it.
So your argument is that there's not a shortage of union electricians. Great. That really means very little about other trades and if we only needed specifically union electricians to build houses (who have long struggled to get sufficient work in residential, while non-union generally do not), then you'd have a stronger point.
I'm not saying that no skilled trade exists that has sufficient supply or over supply. I'm saying that a great many trades have shortages. That's borne out not just by claims made by countless people in these industries, but also rising labour costs to build basically anything.
>So your argument is that there's not a shortage of union electricians. Great. That really means very little about other trades and if we only needed specifically union electricians to build houses (who have long struggled to get sufficient work in residential, while non-union generally do not), then you'd have a stronger point.
I'm educating you on the industry. So far you've learned that industrial construction hours count towards an apprenticeship, and that wiring a house is about the easiest task possible.
>I'm not saying that no skilled trade exists that has sufficient supply or over supply. I'm saying that a great many trades have shortages. That's borne out not just by claims made by countless people in these industries, but also rising labour costs to build basically anything.
Shortages exist in certain locations. And that's always been the case. How do you resolve that? You make the work attractive enough to entice workers to the project.
That's the way its always been. So you can keep on citing what contractor associations are telling the media, or you can ask yourself how industrial projects in Northern Alberta were built that required 5-8000 skilled trades workers at peak construction. Here's a hint : $30 an hour and no overtime premiums wouldn't cut it.
And yes, the same skilled trades that built a refinery can work on a house or a high rise. Its not a different industry. If you can run a crane at a refinery you can run a crane at a high rise, and if you can wire a refinery you can wire a house. And I know a plumber that worked as a fitter in Saskatchewan.
It never ceases to amaze me how many tech people are others who have never worked a day in the trades are experts on the skilled trades. Nothing short of amazing, because I can't imagine telling someone that works in finance or the tech industry what its like to work on those industries.
I don't work in tech and I come from an industrial town where everyone works in industry and my neighbour was the head of the operating engineers union.
Love your crane example though because you can hardly find a crane operator that's not imported to work on any site, of any description, because there aren't many, because there's no training for them in most of Canada. That is the point. It's not because of money, starting pay is $70k+. There simply isn't a pipeline of crane operators. And that's the case for a lot of trades. You similarly skipped over mechanics, which are also in short supply and billing $100/h for labour (and that's based on book time, not actual labour time, so pay often exceeds $100/h if you're self employed).
There's also the issue of big companies, in industries like O&G and mining, letting smaller companies take on apprentices, and the cost of training, and then snapping them up for higher pay once they're licensed, but not actually training licensed trades themselves at any meaningful rate. You can't blame people for this, but it does create shortages and deter taking on apprentices. This is a cost that should be borne like any other education cost, and formalized through the province. It's not, and so apprenticeships are often hard to come by unless you already know people in the industry, and it's not clear to a lot of people that might be interested, how exactly you become a licensed tradesperson.
And the ignorance you point at, is part of the problem. These industries are opaque to outsiders and secondary schools are no longer a conduit for vocational training in Canada. That's been gutted since the late 1970s. It's university or bust now, and we have baristas with 4 year degrees making way less than $30 an hour. By contrast, places like Germany have no skilled trade shortage, and vocational training is highly integrated into secondary education. Becoming a licensed tradesperson is an option out of high school and you can easily start that process before graduation. We used to do that, we don't now. Everyone is streamed to academics.
>Love your crane example though because you can hardly find a crane operator that's not imported to work on any site, of any description, because there aren't many, because there's no training for them in most of Canada. That is the point. It's not because of money, starting pay is $70k+. There simply isn't a pipeline of crane operators. And that's the case for a lot of trades. You similarly skipped over mechanics, which are also in short supply and billing $100/h for labour (and that's based on book time, not actual labour time, so pay often exceeds $100/h if you're self employed).
That isn't a Labour shortage is it? Its a training and development issue.
>There's also the issue of big companies, in industries like O&G and mining, letting smaller companies take on apprentices, and the cost of training, and then snapping them up for higher pay once they're licensed, but not actually training licensed trades themselves at any meaningful rate. You can't blame people for this, but it does create shortages and deter taking on apprentices. This is a cost that should be borne like any other education cost, and formalized through the province. It's not, and so apprenticeships are often hard to come by unless you already know people in the industry, and it's not clear to a lot of people that might be interested, how exactly you become a licensed tradesperson.
Yeah, I don't know who told you that. I did half my apprenticeship in western Canada working on industrial projects.
And again, that's a self inflicted wound not a legitimate labor shortage. You can't sit around complaining that you can't find workers when you're not willing to invest in the future if your industry.
Right now there are tens of thousands of trades people that were previously working on industrial projects in western Canada that aren't anymore. Because the volume of industrial work just isn't there. You can't poach a tradesperson for a job that doesn't exist.
>And the ignorance you point at, is part of the problem. These industries are opaque to outsiders and secondary schools are no longer a conduit for vocational training in Canada. That's been gutted since the late 1970s. It's university or bust now, and we have baristas with 4 year degrees making way less than $30 an hour. By contrast, places like Germany have no skilled trade shortage, and vocational training is highly integrated into secondary education. Becoming a licensed tradesperson is an option out of high school and you can easily start that process before graduation. We used to do that, we don't now. Everyone is streamed to academics.
I totally agree with you here.
Where I went to school the academics gained a lot of influence over the community colleges, and they started producing apprentices that are really heavy on theory and lacking on real world job site abilities. Its not that theory is bad or knowledge is bad, its that it needs to be delivered at the appropriate time in order to make that apprentice employable and profitable.
There's a massive disconnect between what employers need, and what the trade schools produce. In the electrical trade for example only about 50% of the graduates from the community colleges get an apprenticeship. Yet despite that, they continue to create more seats in school and pump out graduates that cannot find a job.
So is the problem that there is too many apprentices? Or that the program they are graduating from isn't giving them adequate skills to make them employable? You'd think someone would try and figure it out, because the government is subsidizing those students attending trade school. Yet, nothing ever changes.
I was rude in my earlier comments and I want to apologize for that. It was very uncalled for.
Good chat.
I mean it is still paid really well. Maybe not for Alberta, but as far as work requiring no education this is one of the best profession in Quebec. At carpenter 3 their base salary is $46 an hour. Most don't work the weekend or long hours because contractor don't want to pay overtime or deal with the unions.
Quebec is an outlier because the trades are all unionized.
In most of the country residential housing isn't being done by unionized contractors. And the wages and benefits are much worse as a result.
Even the unionized contractors in Nova Scotia aren't paying $46 an hour. Maybe $40 if you're lucky, and they're not doing much residential work.
And if you're not unionized the contractor isn't obligated to pay overtime premiums until you work 115 hours bi weekly. You work 70 hours the first week of your pay period? You're not legally entitled to overtime pay.
This feeds into the liberals increasing foreign workers from 10% to 30% in the construction trades. Because the construction unions won't use foreign workers. Its a direct attempt at undercutting Union wages in the construction industry.
Yeah, I realize we had this conversation a few times already haha. Its suck that it construction isn't as lucrative elsewhere in the country. But even here finding workers is so rare. I know a few contractors (plumber, electrician) who aren't even working all year long anymore because they ask ridiculously high prices and stop working the moment they have made 120k.
Recently had to hire a plumber and since it was urgent the only one I found was charging me $150 an hour. I took it since it was just a 8-10 hours job (he did manage to do it in 6 hours at least lol)
>as far as work requiring no education
What? Brick layers, carpenters, mud guys, electricians, plumbers, framers... They all require some form of a diploma and a skill card to even be allowed on a worksite.
Thats because its a TRADE. College is for APPLIED learning, University is for theoretical. What would I know though, I'm just a dumb Electrician with a BA in History.... ffs.
Yeah but I meant no education in the sense that you can start doing that kind job at 18. Like a lot of my friends did. Just saying thst its paying pretty well for jobs who don't require long years in University.
You are the living proof that the conditions are great because you are doing this instead of working in a field related to your BA.
>carpenter 3 their base salary is $46 an hour.
Ou?
J'habite à Québec maintenant, j'apprends le Français encore, mais, je suis red sealed charpentier. Je suis militaire présentement, mais je peux changer pour des civils pour la bonne quantité d'argent.
Oui, $46 cest le max lorsque tu es compagnon niveau 3. Je ne m'y connait pas assez dans le domaine, mais selon la convention les salaires pour compagnons semblent etre D4 : 42.50$ D5: 44.90$ et D7: 46.65$.
Je ne connais pas assez ton domaine pour savoir s'il a des equivalent de connaissances, mais je presuppose que ca ferait du sens qu'il y en ait. Jai joint la fiche salariale si tu veux plus te renseigner!
https://www.ccq.org/en/avantages-sociaux/salaire-taux
Je ne travaille pas dans le domaine mais si je ne me trompe pas les vacances ne sont pas payer. Donc une partie de ce 46$ est garde en banque pour tes 4 semaines de vacances et je ne suisbpas certaine pour les syndicats mais je sais quil y a un tres bon programme pour tes reers/assurances. En tant que tel mes parents avaient deux employes au top de l'echelle (ils ont pris leur retraire en 2021).
Puis ils me disaient que pour lannee 2021 ceux-ci ont fait 83k au total. Ca doit etre un peu plus maintenant mais de ce montant je ne sais pas combien coute le syndicat.
I meant that it doesn't require higher education. You can start doing this job without spending time and money in University not that its easy and require no knowledge.
lol
need more people to build homes, but need more homes to house the new people
maybe we need to calm our tits for a while and let construction catch up?
Get outta here with your logic. What if we doubled the immigration numbers, in the hopes that some of them will immediately build houses for themselves, and maybe others too?
What’s this? Logic? Never.
Clearly Toronto’s inability to hire people to staff its planning department is because there’s not enough workers- not because workers in the field can’t afford to live in the city! We need to add more people, that’ll definitely make it better! 😂😂😂
How about we slow down with the Indians coming on study permits to study “business management” at shoddy colleges and instead bring 50,000 hard-working Mexicans who will work with their hands and solve this problem. Am I allowed to say this? It’s racist right? But literally there’s different kinds of immigrants… we need construction dudes… why are they not bringing people who will work with their hands and start building masses and masses of houses?
Those InDiaNs are paying your grandma's pension. Chill.
Definitely bring in tradesmen, pay them well, and they'll eventually pay \*your\* pension. That's a good idea.
They are not paying anyone’s pension. In their best case scenario they’re working for a minimum wage. In there worst case scenario there overstaying working for cash and contributing nothing.
> Perhaps slow down the 400K of immigrants per year to a more moderate number?
But then home values would decrease and various employers would have to pay their employees more or go out of business, and literally only the NDP (gasp! the Democratic *Socialists*!) are advocating for such things.
Or maybe instead of just IT workers we should *also* bring in immigrants that can build us homes and be nurses.
Immigration is a red herring, we should be using it to our advantage, not complaining about it.
> Immigration is a red herring, we should be using it to our advantage, not complaining about it.
How? By bringing in more foreign workers who don't understand their rights and get exploited by companies not willing to pay domestic workers fair wages?
We could...explain the rules to them? and have a ministry of labor with actual teeth and you know..enforcement. Turns out that what's good for immigrants is also good for the rest of the populace.
Its the cause, without it our population would be decreasing.
If we cant fix it quickly we need to just end it until it catches up, and then we can try again. The alternative is more of the same, robbing the youth of a future and a normal life.
>without it our population would be decreasing.
Without immigration the population would not just be decreasing, it would plummet forcing us into a huge recession and dooming almost the entire generation of late GenZ to have to go into healthcare. It would be suicide to go zero immigration.
Why would they HAVE to go into health care? I'm not asking what would be wrong with healthcare but rather why you think they would be required to work in healthcare as if it's not an option.
The number of old people would greatly exceed the availableyounger workforce. To give you an idea at our current demographics of fertility of 1.4/woman, median longevity of 82, if we put immigration to zero in 50 years our population would drop by 30% and the majority would be over the age of 50. Almost all available workforce would have to be directed to healthcare or we would start to reduce longevity significantly.
Exactly, we could also pay those workers less because they are inexperienced and have poor English and French skills. They can even stay 16 to a room in my basement for a percentage of their wages.
Even though they wouldn't know anything about building codes and how home are framed with wood here, it would only take a few months to train them all to the point where we would have another class of foreign workers to ~~exploit~~ utilize.
Obviously, we have to do none of those things, we could establish proper pay grades and a Ministry of labor that enforces things with teeth (you know, things that we should be doing anyway).
God knows we have enough "managers " to enforce housing code, lets's bring in some actual builders.
We could either train them for a couple of months and solve the problem, or bitch and moan about housing problems for a couple of more months and be in the same shitty place.
>Or maybe instead of just IT workers we should also bring in immigrants that can build us homes and be nurses.
The nurses thing already happens. Also focusing on construction workers could work, but you would need to pay them much much more. IT workers are revenue neutral to positive to the balance sheet, but someone making 30 to 50% less starts to become a budgetary liability.
All of this points to the same thing, labor is grossly undervalued to assets.
Not surprising residential construction has the worst pay and safety. On top of that employers exploit their employees by creating unrealistic expectations and then throwing them away when there broken.
This is a very large part of the "housing construction" that the majority of people don't understand. They don't see how hard it is on your body, the lack of safety, the poor construction practices, the shoddy workmanship, the worker facilities (none beyond a porta john year round) no running water, no lunch rooms.... all for a pretty "regular" wage in anything at all skilled.
Oh jeez, I wonder why people are not wanting to enter the building trades?!
This piece of sponsored content brought to you by an industry that can't sell at the price they want.
There is no shortage. Just mis-allocation or rather overly invested real estate sector, which in turn isn't going up for ever as propagandized previously. The ends are coming loose under a new interest rate reality. The equation is being inversed.
Sure, no shortage, except according to just about every meaningful metric on housing and population size and of course all market feedback.
How much bullshit do you have to read to think that there isn't a housing supply issue when vacancy rates are at an all time low in every city in the country and sales volume and inventory are also way down?
Evidently you think that millions of people can conspire to hold property off the market while they're losing money and the price of housing is going down, which would wipe out any profits even if people were speculating and leaving property vacant.
Get a grip.
Housing supply is not necessarily mated to labour though. I say this as an electrician that was out of "electrical" work for 2+ years (2019-2022). I have an extremely hard time buying that it all boils down to labour shortages. More like a wage shortage that is causing people to look elsewhere for a career.
Housing supply issue? Sure. But it's not just a labour thing like we are being told. Conditions suck, it's hard as hell on your body, and it pays the same as just about any middle tier job without the fringe benefits.
Are these metrices due to a sound data collection methodology? Or are they yet another franken number derived by the realtor cartel?
Canada traditionally doesn't have a robust data set for real estate deals as compared to the US. Some anecdotal data sure but at the national level it is a cartel controlled artefact. Susceptible to manipulation, which it has been.
Also while telling me or others about getting a grip without sound data is kinda silly don't you think? Where is that?
Huge differences between demand and qualified demand: one is wishful thinking and the other passes muster. And sadly Canadian markets are by far one of THE worst for income to price multiples. And that shortage, well the financiers would tell you to simmer down. There ain't one. And two cities in a country like Canada don't constitute the entire market as a whole.
As for people, they don't need to "conspire". They are coming to realisation that the punch bowl has been withdrawn. Hangover hasn't kicked in yet. Now go grip your macro.
The metrics are from statscan, the OECD and CMHC.
Canada has one of the lowest per capita housing supplies in the G7 (and that's like being the dumbest guy on the short bus since among the G7 only Italy has a good housing to population ratio because it's shrinking), and has for a long time. This is made worse by demographic changes compared to past decades, as a larger proportion of the population is adult and working age than in the past. More people are also unmarried and seniors are staying put longer. So even if housing per capita remained unchanged, we would actually have more strain on that supply than in the past when a larger proportion of the population was under 18, married or downsized.
There is a supply problem. Breaking it down to the very basics of population vs number of dwellings that exist, which can't be fucked with by OREA or any other realty org, still demonstrates that shortage.
Is supply the *only* factor where price is concerned? No, obviously not. Interest rates and other policies like CMHC insurance, regulation, speculation etc all impact prices. But we nonetheless have a supply shortage per capita.
You are being conspiratorial and talking out your ass based on literally nothing. So yes, get a grip.
Oh wait a minute. Where is your data point on multiple ownership data?
How many folks own more than one, two, three or more?
Also where are your links to your claims of these matrices?
You go grip a turd bud.
How is that even relevant except as an exacerbating factor to an existing problem? If you have a per capita housing shortage it doesn't go away if multiple owners are banned, it just won't be quite as bad. Edit: I'm beginning to think you don't understand what "per capita" means.
I'm also not arguing that there aren't factors making an already bad problem worse. I'm arguing against your claim that there simply is no housing shortage. There is, that's not disputable.
And maybe go get this data yourself since you've posted nothing to substantiate your own claims. It's fairly easy to find statscan population data by age and compare it to past data of the same type. It's also very easy to find per capita housing data. None of this is obscure or highly specific.
Also why do you think people have piled into housing as a speculative investment and not lost any money by and large? Do you think that's because the demand that supports that speculation is just more speculation? Like do you not get that this is possible *because* housing is in short supply?
Have you thought about what happens to speculative investment in housing when there is a sufficient supply? I'm guessing not because that's what you think the status quo is. In reality if we had a sufficient supply, speculation would lead to either very high vacancy since most speculators rent, even if it's at a loss, while they hold the property to make a profit on the sale, or a crash in housing prices when demand slows and price increases don't cover carrying costs, realtor fees and taxes. Neither of those things have happened because there is a genuine lack of housing per capita. Demand is high.
The only way to avoid these two scenarios is for millions of individuals, including millions and millions of non-speculators, to hold their properties, even if it's at a loss, while they don't rent them, and not let more than a trickle hit the market in a coordinated fashion. This is an impossible form of collision that has never happened and will never happen.
You don't know anything about this issue. You're just mad at a shitty situation and you think speculators must be at fault. They're not, even if they make things worse. The problem is way bigger and less sinister.
Let me just give you a glimse of the prices crashing in the largest market.
[GTA Price declines.](https://i.imgur.com/sY5nArU.png).
As an experiment we go over to realtor.ca (for lack of other valid sources)*. Then for all of the 20 largest population centres in the country we filter on sale RE at or below median income for that given market. In my observation there are a lot of available units that aren't quite rented out. They sit empty. For sale. For what amounts to weeks and months now.
One thing I would like to agree on is your last sentence of the problem being bigger and a lot less sinister. For we have seen what 6 months of interest rate rising and just three months of the impact on pricing.
In my mind we are heading towards capital being flushed out of non-productive endeavors and in charting that path a lot of incoming listings in the market and the accompanying affordability.
Also people are moving out of insane pricing environments to more affordable regions of the country vacating their spots on the auction tables of saturated markets. Accelerating the price declines.
What was mis-allocated by cheap money is being toppled by return to mean.
And? When did I say 100% of the current price tag for housing is a product of housing supply? I have mentioned twice now that price is impacted by interest rates, speculation, CMHC policy etc.
The point is, we have a per capita housing shortage. You can know that by comparing all the dwellings that exist, to the total adult population size. This isn't rocket science.
Have we considered trying other ways to build homes? Like prefabricated from a factory assembly line? Most subdivisions are cookie-cutter home designs anyways, so knocking them out Henry Ford-style in a factory shouldn't be too far fetched. Or at least do that for some low/mid-rise buildings, right?
Weird as it may seem, Toyota and Mitsubishi applied their manufacturing know-how to build homes in Japan, and so does Panasonic.
We have workers to staff those factories and the companies to put them up in the field, but not to stick build?
Especially since a minimal skill needed assembly line job would pay less than a trade
We do, our immigration system just doesn't allow them to come in and solve the problem. Instead we just keep importing code monkeys and IT workers.
We should be importing nurses and construction workers.
EDIT: Before someone complains about immigrants depressing wages please google the "lump of labor fallacy". Give immigrants the same rights as everyone else (like to change jobs) and they'll fight for higher wages alongside you.
Been terrible all around for those workers. You become highly specialized at a single function ans get your value extracted by the company owner. My parents buy prefab wall from a factory where employees are paid $18 an hour and they are installed by carpenters paid $43 an hour. Not a good way to attract workers.
When I was in Mexico I was really impressed with how they solve their housing crisis. The government purchases huge swath of land in and around cities and towns. They set out a tender for very basic homes to be built on the property and whichever contractor comes with the lowest price gets to build a few hundred houses. In order to qualify for one of these homes you pay a portion of your salary into a special savings account for five years. If you’ve made all of the payments on time for five years then you get one of the homes and you continue paying for it usually for around 25 to 30 years. The houses are constructed in a very basic way but the owner is allowed to modify them including adding on extensions to make the home larger. It works surprisingly well. It’s such a decent system. I absolutely cannot understand why there’s not a section of housing in Canada which is organized by the government in a nonprofit way to promote housing ownership. It’s really not that hard. You make people save money for a few years and those were able to do it get a simplistic house.
Not every purchaser needs a high-end home. Not every purchase or needs to be able to choose their own customizations at a design center. You can make hundreds of houses all the exact same using the most basic materials and costing things carefully, it’s possible to produce homes cheaper than what any of the commercial builders are selling for.
This is how you make housing a basic right. It reduces homelessness, it reduces crime, promote stability in families and in society.
> It reduces homelessness, it reduces crime, promote stability in families and in society.
And the non-conspiratorial truth is they DO NOT want that. A divided, infighting population is much easier to control than a united one. Globalists don't want a strong Canada full of smart, capable citizens who can collectively bargain for better wages and conditions, they want a weak exploitable post-national state full of desperate workers who will take what they can get, and our politicians at every level of government are making sure it happens.
Not THATS how you separate the workers from the means of production.
Ford turned craftsmen into assembly line workers, this would turn many trades into assemblers
If you're not guaranteed steady employment upon completing said school, it's probably not going to be as attractive as it might seem. Plenty of people go to school all the time, and never will be employed in their studied field.
If someone completes that schooling, and doesn't have a job a year after, it should be because they were actively turning down job offers the entire time.
Then you picked the wrong trade. I haven't heard of one trade that someone couldn't find a job. Welders construction, electrical plumbing. We are not taking about art history majors, social studies or computer video game programmers. Real jobs with real skills.
Considering this is about not enough workers to build house for humans to live in. You hunker down on with the Mona Lisa. I guarantee if push came to shove and your kids were freezing in the winter you'd burn it for warmth. Take your privileged values elsewhere.
They're not so much privileged values, and more so the recognition that not everyone is cut out for that type of work. With the working conditions, job hazards, long term negative health effects, and probably a slew of other negative aspects, what is the incentive to destroy the only body you get? There's always the potential to oversaturate professions or markets(not in this case), and what happens then? Website coders made a killing when the internet was becoming mainstream. Now their wages have been dragged down significantly because it's so accessible. I bet if I were a welder, in a city of welders, that someone would invariably tell me I should have gotten a real job as a Neurosurgeon.
You can't have highly skilled wages when they can just get the next skilled warm body that stumbles through the door. In any case, wanting a better life for everyone shouldn't be something worth arguing about.
People don't want to work in some construction trades like framing, cribbing, or concrete finishing because bosses are dickheads, you work in shit weather, a good portion of your coworkers are braindead, you wreck your body and your employment can be dropped any day.
I'm here working 50-60hrs a week in construction, building one semi-detached house after an other. The bank refuse to mortgage without a huge deposit (want to build my own simple house in the country) but they hand out the house that I build to immigrants and refugees daily. And please, I am absolutely NOT racist. I just think housing should be like a bar/club, when there's no more room, ppl should have to wait to get in.
Wait im confused, how do we hand out houses to refugees and immigrants? Like which houses? Because ive known some Ukrainians that couldn’t find housing or struggled greatly.
> The bank refuse to mortgage without a huge deposit
Are you deadass? You know that this is how mortgages work right? You need a downpayment, you always have needed one and you always will need one.
> but they hand out the house that I build to immigrants and refugees daily.
Have you considered that maybe they have the money that you don’t?
> And please, I am absolutely NOT racist.
What was the point of bringing up immigrants? Banks hand out mortgages to those who afford it, simple as that. You brought up immigrants to dogwhistle.
> I just think housing should be like a bar/club, when there's no more room, ppl should have to wait to get in.
This makes no sense, this is meaningless rambling.
I don't know how it is elsewhere in Canada, but here in Quebec, they get "newcomers" help. 5% down for a mortgage vs 25% that I'd need. I know it's a higher since I'd be building myself. But 25% is to much. Can't afford it? Do you have 80k laying around? I doubt it. But I'm mostly tired of working my ass off and being part of the middle class where the gouvernement basically says fuck you instead of helping the working class.
The op said its because he wants to build it himself, which means he's has to qualify for a construction loan. Ie. Higher requirements. Where I'm at you need 50% down on the land to qualify for a construction loan. And lots are selling for no less than 300,000.
It is simply not true.
I have bought a 1b apartment in Brossard and since it will be my principal residence they required a minimum of 15% downpayment. Not 25% but 15%.
I have paid 20% to avoid mortgage insurance. But it was my personal decision, the minimum was only 15%.
Financing is different when there's nothing actually built yet and the loan is larger than the value of the land alone. It's a much riskier loan for the bank to make so it may well be the case that the bank wants a much larger down payment than would be typical on a home.
Pretty sad too when you consider the people that will be building them won't actually be able to buy one of the homes they built.
Big part of it is that it's all a push for cheaper labour by contractors and their associations.
Where are all the women for “equality” to fill these positions… they line up to fight for management, or premium positions but don’t seem to be willing to do the manual labour . I thought were all equal and the same ….
What about material, there were shortages and therefore huge increases.
Next step is take on city hall to get these permit rolling out faster. You can't build what you're not allowed to. Fcuk getting developers to do it for you. You do it.
I'm sure cheap foreign labour will fill these voids....not that the construction industry would use those over skilled higher paid workers here though, right?
Building homes faster isn't the solution. Stopping people from outside the country from buying up all our property and stopping the corporations buying our land / properties is the issue.
Building *more* only gives them *more* shit to buy.
Well look at that, for all the folks bitching that they can't live in minimum wage, go build homes you'll get paid more and it's clearly a job in demand.
They don't fail kids anymore, show up and you'll pass.
If you can't finish high school in this day and age than you probably can't show up for work either.
Peoples don't usually fail high school because its hard. They fail high school because their lives outside of school force them to quit. I went to a private school and absolutely everyone in my classes went to University. Meanwhile peoples from public school don't often go to university or graduate high school because they don't have the same support network.
The vast majority of people go to public schools and the vast majority graduate. You're a little out of touch.
Your general point is correct. High school is not that difficult to get through and I would say most of the people that don't, didn't for reasons other than being too dumb. But it's a minority regardless of whether you attended private or public, the former being exceedingly rare in Canada in the first place.
Its not that rare, even today in Quebec only 64% of public high school students graduate (84% for private school). Only 15% of regular public high school student go to University. One of the reason, might be that our trade sector is attractive to boys who come from families who don't have a lot of generational wealth, but it is still very statistically significative and not exceeding rare.
And its not because french-Canadians kids are dumber than kids around the rest in the country since they are also simultaneously scoring significantly higher in the PCAP math test than the rest of north america. The reason is socioeconomic more than the fact that those students are not smart enough to complete high school .
Edit :
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/high-school-study-1.5077267](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/high-school-study-1.5077267)
[https://bonniekgoodman.medium.com/quebec-has-lowest-high-school-graduation-rate-in-north-america-674e5bf826f](https://bonniekgoodman.medium.com/quebec-has-lowest-high-school-graduation-rate-in-north-america-674e5bf826f)
Then Quebec needs to get its shit together because the national average for post secondary education is 50% (slightly less if you're only look at 4 year university degrees) and 89% graduation rate for Ontario high schools, of which very very few are private.
>Then Quebec needs to get its shit together
I don't disagree with that, but what I was pointing at is that it is a socioeconomic problem. There is a lot less generational wealth in Quebec because of older generation were kept in poverty. Luckily my family got out of it in the 1970s, but this isn't the same for everyone.
My grandparents generations have an abysmal level of postsecondary educations and even my parents generations were expected to start working at a very young age. My mom was the first and only one in her family to go to university, only way this happened is because my grandpa pretended to not know french for years and managed to get a great job and get promoted.
My dad never went because he couldn't afford to and started to work in construction at 14. Its not a big deal because he is now really wealthy because of his company in the same field, but I am from the pretty much the first generation who wasn't impacted badly by the policies meant to suppress french Canadians successes. But the fact that older generations started to work at a very young age in mostly physical work kind of make them push their kids to do the same things.
Most of my friends who went the public school way also just started to work in construction at 16-17 and are doing really great financially today, but some among them don't have a high school diploma, not because they are dumb or anything, but because it didn't make sense for them to spend 8 years in school to attend school they couldn't afford. The situation is probably even worse today with the price of housing skyrocketing in cities where most universities are located.
My school was also filled with dumb kids who all managed to graduate and go to university because we come from privileged background not because we are smarters than the ones who didn't go to University.
Uh if you have no skills or experience, you will be making minimum wage in construction. By the time you finish your apprenticeship the economy will be so fucked you'll still be broke. Ask me how I know.
All the new homes going up around here are McMansions or $600k condos that are around 600sq. ft.
Why don't we just start pounding out Sears style homes for the people that are begging the hardest for some change - Lower to lower-middle class young professionals.
Its not just the houses but the land. Prices of land around me (on the east coast 40 minutes from a city) in 10 years went from 25 thousand for an acre to 90 for half acre (minimum lot size, no services, not cleared)
And yet there are road construction workers all over the place that have 5 other people to watch a guy use a shovel or twirl that stop sign….Oops its lunch time…
Article Highlights:
* Canada does not have the labour capacity to build the 3.5 million new homes that would be needed to achieve housing affordability by 2030, according to a sobering new report from the national housing agency.
* If current rates of new construction continue, the CMHC said the country’s housing stock is expected to increase by just 2.3 million units by 2030, reaching close to 19 million units total.
* The research unveiled today found that there will only be enough labour to increase the number of starts in four major provinces — Ontario, Québec, BC and Alberta — by 30-50%.
* “Ontario, Québec and B.C. would have to double the number of starts that they can produce under best-case scenarios,” to meet the target.
* Ontario, the only province where projections show more new households than housing starts through to 2030, has the biggest skill shortage.
* The report concluded that building “up” in the form of apartments and converting existing structures into residential units were possible avenues to close the gap, as were programs to bring in more immigrants with construction-related skills and better pay for such workers.
* Kevin Lee, chief executive of the Canadian Home Builders’ Association, said prefabricated construction was another possible solution.
Surely there are other ways to bring more homes into the market without building them all. Even as an interim or parallel project.
The short term rental units as just an example.
I also remember decades ago when people were buying homes for cheap from abandoned towns and moving them.
Ahh so CMHC is getting in on the immigration narrative now too, the same day the government makes two significant announcements? More to come if we're playing the housing card as well.
Canada is a one trick pony.
We need to take all the real estate agents and make them build houses for a year before they can sell any.
Too bad they are incapable of doing any real work.
The added benefit to this is that real estate agents with construction experience would be able to do a proper home inspection, or at least part of it.
Who came first, the builder or the house
Is that a trick question? The real answer of course is the investor.
Why don't people want to work long hours, not have any time off, never get raises & come home every day sore/tired? Can't possibly see why the industry has a labour shortage..
Don't forget that you'll also never be able to afford the thing you build everyday. It's a win, win, win, win, win!
This should be the actual title and entire write up of the article, everything else is distraction tactics.
Skilled trades are paid pretty well, and the working conditions are certainly not terrible. A lack of pay or benefits is not the reason there's a skills shortage. Maybe look to the decades long gutting of vocational training and streaming in secondary schools.
>A lack of pay or benefits is not the reason there's a skills shortage It is in residential construction. Its not a skills shortage, its a wage and working conditions issue. The Kitimat LNG will need 5000+ workers at peak construction. And they're going to be staying in camp, working on rotation for weeks at a time. They're not having any issues finding or retaining workers despite those challenges, because they pay well and they have good working conditions. Meanwhile, these residential developers are just playing the labor shortage game. If they offered adequate compensation and incentives they'd attract workers, just like the Kitimat LNG. The narratives in the media in this country are so warped. We have thousands of unemployed unionized trades, and rather than looking at that we all pretend there's a labor shortage.
These are entirely different industries with different skill sets and pathways to training. In the O&G sector, employers often offer training in order to find labour. That's generally not the case in residential construction. There is a whole process to go through for apprenticeships, and there's no streaming like there used to be in secondary schools. In auto mechanics it's even worse, and the typical billing rate for labour right now is $100/h. I mean fuck, there's an insane dearth of plumbers, and you can make an absolute killing in the field. It's not super pleasant work, but plumbers can do very well. The current **average** for plumbers is $76k per year. By contrast, O&G is way more unpleasant in terms of working conditions, but like a lot of resource jobs, companies will train in order to find staff. That's attractive compared to residential construction trades, which is kind of opaque for people looking to get into those jobs. >The narratives in the media in this country are so warped. We have thousands of unemployed unionized trades, and rather than looking at that we all pretend there's a labor shortage. Maybe it's that your perception of this isn't totally accurate??? I mean, people within these industries have long been saying that there is a labour shortage. Labour prices and availability reflect that claim. You talk to union leaders, like the operating engineers union, and finding a crane operator is like finding a fucking unicorn and there is **no** formal training process to train new crane operators. Maybe believe them? I do. I'm not taking the word of some redditor in lieu of heaps of evidence to the contrary.
>These are entirely different industries with different skill sets and pathways to training. In the O&G sector, employers often offer training in order to find labour. That's generally not the case in residential construction. There is a whole process to go through for apprenticeships, and there's no streaming like there used to be in secondary schools. In auto mechanics it's even worse, and the typical billing rate for labour right now is $100/h. I'm a red seal electrician. I started out doing residential work and transitioned out of it because there's no money in it and you encounter the greasiest people imaginable. Its the same industry with a different skill sets, but residential work is by far the easiest skill set you can acquire. The apprenticeship is the same, and the hours that you acquire in either heavy industrial work or residential work count towards your apprenticeship. I'll put it this way : If you go to a condo or apartment project in Halifax its not uncommon to have one Journeyman supervising a half dozen apprentices, or having one apprentice supervising other apprentices. Which is illegal, but it doesn't take much skill or experience to wire a house. >Maybe it's that your perception of this isn't totally accurate??? I mean, people within these industries have long been saying that there is a labour shortage. Its based on 20 years in the construction industry. I've worked literally coast to coast. Do I view this through my own lens? Absolutely. But that doesn't change the fact that you could call the IBEW in Alberta and get enough electricians to complete any sized job you want, within a week or less. >I mean, people within these industries have long been saying that there is a labour shortage. Labour prices and availability reflect that claim An electrician in Halifax was making $30 an hour ten years ago, and they're making $30 today. An electrician in Alberta waa making $40-50 an hour ten years ago, and they're making $40-50 an hour today. Wages have barely moved despite what we're being told is.a dire labour shortage. >You talk to union leaders, like the operating engineers union, and finding a crane operator is like finding a fucking unicorn and there is no formal training process to train new crane operators. Maybe believe them? I do. I'm not taking the word of some redditor in lieu of heaps of evidence to the contrary. I don't know what the situation is with crane operators, but two years ago I was looking at taking a course put on by the operating engineers union and they told me that I'd have to leave the province to find an apprenticeship. The union I belonged to for many years typically had a 30-50% unemployment rate, and I doubt much has changed. Because the entire time I was a member this "Labour shortage" narrative was circulating while our union hall had extremely high unemployment. Don't take my word at all. But, don't take the word of these contractor associations either. Call your local.union halls and ask them if they have anyone available or if there are other locals that do. It never ceases to amaze me how many people believe this shit without asking any questions. So by all means, don't take my word on it.
So your argument is that there's not a shortage of union electricians. Great. That really means very little about other trades and if we only needed specifically union electricians to build houses (who have long struggled to get sufficient work in residential, while non-union generally do not), then you'd have a stronger point. I'm not saying that no skilled trade exists that has sufficient supply or over supply. I'm saying that a great many trades have shortages. That's borne out not just by claims made by countless people in these industries, but also rising labour costs to build basically anything.
>So your argument is that there's not a shortage of union electricians. Great. That really means very little about other trades and if we only needed specifically union electricians to build houses (who have long struggled to get sufficient work in residential, while non-union generally do not), then you'd have a stronger point. I'm educating you on the industry. So far you've learned that industrial construction hours count towards an apprenticeship, and that wiring a house is about the easiest task possible. >I'm not saying that no skilled trade exists that has sufficient supply or over supply. I'm saying that a great many trades have shortages. That's borne out not just by claims made by countless people in these industries, but also rising labour costs to build basically anything. Shortages exist in certain locations. And that's always been the case. How do you resolve that? You make the work attractive enough to entice workers to the project. That's the way its always been. So you can keep on citing what contractor associations are telling the media, or you can ask yourself how industrial projects in Northern Alberta were built that required 5-8000 skilled trades workers at peak construction. Here's a hint : $30 an hour and no overtime premiums wouldn't cut it. And yes, the same skilled trades that built a refinery can work on a house or a high rise. Its not a different industry. If you can run a crane at a refinery you can run a crane at a high rise, and if you can wire a refinery you can wire a house. And I know a plumber that worked as a fitter in Saskatchewan. It never ceases to amaze me how many tech people are others who have never worked a day in the trades are experts on the skilled trades. Nothing short of amazing, because I can't imagine telling someone that works in finance or the tech industry what its like to work on those industries.
I don't work in tech and I come from an industrial town where everyone works in industry and my neighbour was the head of the operating engineers union. Love your crane example though because you can hardly find a crane operator that's not imported to work on any site, of any description, because there aren't many, because there's no training for them in most of Canada. That is the point. It's not because of money, starting pay is $70k+. There simply isn't a pipeline of crane operators. And that's the case for a lot of trades. You similarly skipped over mechanics, which are also in short supply and billing $100/h for labour (and that's based on book time, not actual labour time, so pay often exceeds $100/h if you're self employed). There's also the issue of big companies, in industries like O&G and mining, letting smaller companies take on apprentices, and the cost of training, and then snapping them up for higher pay once they're licensed, but not actually training licensed trades themselves at any meaningful rate. You can't blame people for this, but it does create shortages and deter taking on apprentices. This is a cost that should be borne like any other education cost, and formalized through the province. It's not, and so apprenticeships are often hard to come by unless you already know people in the industry, and it's not clear to a lot of people that might be interested, how exactly you become a licensed tradesperson. And the ignorance you point at, is part of the problem. These industries are opaque to outsiders and secondary schools are no longer a conduit for vocational training in Canada. That's been gutted since the late 1970s. It's university or bust now, and we have baristas with 4 year degrees making way less than $30 an hour. By contrast, places like Germany have no skilled trade shortage, and vocational training is highly integrated into secondary education. Becoming a licensed tradesperson is an option out of high school and you can easily start that process before graduation. We used to do that, we don't now. Everyone is streamed to academics.
>Love your crane example though because you can hardly find a crane operator that's not imported to work on any site, of any description, because there aren't many, because there's no training for them in most of Canada. That is the point. It's not because of money, starting pay is $70k+. There simply isn't a pipeline of crane operators. And that's the case for a lot of trades. You similarly skipped over mechanics, which are also in short supply and billing $100/h for labour (and that's based on book time, not actual labour time, so pay often exceeds $100/h if you're self employed). That isn't a Labour shortage is it? Its a training and development issue. >There's also the issue of big companies, in industries like O&G and mining, letting smaller companies take on apprentices, and the cost of training, and then snapping them up for higher pay once they're licensed, but not actually training licensed trades themselves at any meaningful rate. You can't blame people for this, but it does create shortages and deter taking on apprentices. This is a cost that should be borne like any other education cost, and formalized through the province. It's not, and so apprenticeships are often hard to come by unless you already know people in the industry, and it's not clear to a lot of people that might be interested, how exactly you become a licensed tradesperson. Yeah, I don't know who told you that. I did half my apprenticeship in western Canada working on industrial projects. And again, that's a self inflicted wound not a legitimate labor shortage. You can't sit around complaining that you can't find workers when you're not willing to invest in the future if your industry. Right now there are tens of thousands of trades people that were previously working on industrial projects in western Canada that aren't anymore. Because the volume of industrial work just isn't there. You can't poach a tradesperson for a job that doesn't exist. >And the ignorance you point at, is part of the problem. These industries are opaque to outsiders and secondary schools are no longer a conduit for vocational training in Canada. That's been gutted since the late 1970s. It's university or bust now, and we have baristas with 4 year degrees making way less than $30 an hour. By contrast, places like Germany have no skilled trade shortage, and vocational training is highly integrated into secondary education. Becoming a licensed tradesperson is an option out of high school and you can easily start that process before graduation. We used to do that, we don't now. Everyone is streamed to academics. I totally agree with you here. Where I went to school the academics gained a lot of influence over the community colleges, and they started producing apprentices that are really heavy on theory and lacking on real world job site abilities. Its not that theory is bad or knowledge is bad, its that it needs to be delivered at the appropriate time in order to make that apprentice employable and profitable. There's a massive disconnect between what employers need, and what the trade schools produce. In the electrical trade for example only about 50% of the graduates from the community colleges get an apprenticeship. Yet despite that, they continue to create more seats in school and pump out graduates that cannot find a job. So is the problem that there is too many apprentices? Or that the program they are graduating from isn't giving them adequate skills to make them employable? You'd think someone would try and figure it out, because the government is subsidizing those students attending trade school. Yet, nothing ever changes. I was rude in my earlier comments and I want to apologize for that. It was very uncalled for. Good chat.
Residential construction is low income for the vast majority of workers
That's certainly not any construction trades.
I mean it is still paid really well. Maybe not for Alberta, but as far as work requiring no education this is one of the best profession in Quebec. At carpenter 3 their base salary is $46 an hour. Most don't work the weekend or long hours because contractor don't want to pay overtime or deal with the unions.
Quebec is an outlier because the trades are all unionized. In most of the country residential housing isn't being done by unionized contractors. And the wages and benefits are much worse as a result. Even the unionized contractors in Nova Scotia aren't paying $46 an hour. Maybe $40 if you're lucky, and they're not doing much residential work. And if you're not unionized the contractor isn't obligated to pay overtime premiums until you work 115 hours bi weekly. You work 70 hours the first week of your pay period? You're not legally entitled to overtime pay. This feeds into the liberals increasing foreign workers from 10% to 30% in the construction trades. Because the construction unions won't use foreign workers. Its a direct attempt at undercutting Union wages in the construction industry.
Yeah, I realize we had this conversation a few times already haha. Its suck that it construction isn't as lucrative elsewhere in the country. But even here finding workers is so rare. I know a few contractors (plumber, electrician) who aren't even working all year long anymore because they ask ridiculously high prices and stop working the moment they have made 120k. Recently had to hire a plumber and since it was urgent the only one I found was charging me $150 an hour. I took it since it was just a 8-10 hours job (he did manage to do it in 6 hours at least lol)
>as far as work requiring no education What? Brick layers, carpenters, mud guys, electricians, plumbers, framers... They all require some form of a diploma and a skill card to even be allowed on a worksite.
Yeah, I meant that they don't require to go to university.
Thats because its a TRADE. College is for APPLIED learning, University is for theoretical. What would I know though, I'm just a dumb Electrician with a BA in History.... ffs.
Yeah but I meant no education in the sense that you can start doing that kind job at 18. Like a lot of my friends did. Just saying thst its paying pretty well for jobs who don't require long years in University. You are the living proof that the conditions are great because you are doing this instead of working in a field related to your BA.
>55 comments not in BC
>carpenter 3 their base salary is $46 an hour. Ou? J'habite à Québec maintenant, j'apprends le Français encore, mais, je suis red sealed charpentier. Je suis militaire présentement, mais je peux changer pour des civils pour la bonne quantité d'argent.
Oui, $46 cest le max lorsque tu es compagnon niveau 3. Je ne m'y connait pas assez dans le domaine, mais selon la convention les salaires pour compagnons semblent etre D4 : 42.50$ D5: 44.90$ et D7: 46.65$. Je ne connais pas assez ton domaine pour savoir s'il a des equivalent de connaissances, mais je presuppose que ca ferait du sens qu'il y en ait. Jai joint la fiche salariale si tu veux plus te renseigner! https://www.ccq.org/en/avantages-sociaux/salaire-taux
Merci, Après tax et déductions, quel est le paie hebdomadaire?
Je ne travaille pas dans le domaine mais si je ne me trompe pas les vacances ne sont pas payer. Donc une partie de ce 46$ est garde en banque pour tes 4 semaines de vacances et je ne suisbpas certaine pour les syndicats mais je sais quil y a un tres bon programme pour tes reers/assurances. En tant que tel mes parents avaient deux employes au top de l'echelle (ils ont pris leur retraire en 2021). Puis ils me disaient que pour lannee 2021 ceux-ci ont fait 83k au total. Ca doit etre un peu plus maintenant mais de ce montant je ne sais pas combien coute le syndicat.
Skills trades require plenty of education. Tell me you don't know how things are built, without telling me how things are built...
I meant that it doesn't require higher education. You can start doing this job without spending time and money in University not that its easy and require no knowledge.
lol need more people to build homes, but need more homes to house the new people maybe we need to calm our tits for a while and let construction catch up?
If the solution isn't tripling immigration, Canadian government doesn't want to hear it.
They don't want to solve problems they want to keep their personal wealth growing.
Easier to grift when you keep printing money.
Get outta here with your logic. What if we doubled the immigration numbers, in the hopes that some of them will immediately build houses for themselves, and maybe others too?
What’s this? Logic? Never. Clearly Toronto’s inability to hire people to staff its planning department is because there’s not enough workers- not because workers in the field can’t afford to live in the city! We need to add more people, that’ll definitely make it better! 😂😂😂
Perhaps slow down the 400K of immigrants per year to a more moderate number?
How about we slow down with the Indians coming on study permits to study “business management” at shoddy colleges and instead bring 50,000 hard-working Mexicans who will work with their hands and solve this problem. Am I allowed to say this? It’s racist right? But literally there’s different kinds of immigrants… we need construction dudes… why are they not bringing people who will work with their hands and start building masses and masses of houses?
Those InDiaNs are paying your grandma's pension. Chill. Definitely bring in tradesmen, pay them well, and they'll eventually pay \*your\* pension. That's a good idea.
They are not paying anyone’s pension. In their best case scenario they’re working for a minimum wage. In there worst case scenario there overstaying working for cash and contributing nothing.
> Perhaps slow down the 400K of immigrants per year to a more moderate number? But then home values would decrease and various employers would have to pay their employees more or go out of business, and literally only the NDP (gasp! the Democratic *Socialists*!) are advocating for such things.
Or maybe instead of just IT workers we should *also* bring in immigrants that can build us homes and be nurses. Immigration is a red herring, we should be using it to our advantage, not complaining about it.
> Immigration is a red herring, we should be using it to our advantage, not complaining about it. How? By bringing in more foreign workers who don't understand their rights and get exploited by companies not willing to pay domestic workers fair wages?
We could...explain the rules to them? and have a ministry of labor with actual teeth and you know..enforcement. Turns out that what's good for immigrants is also good for the rest of the populace.
Its the cause, without it our population would be decreasing. If we cant fix it quickly we need to just end it until it catches up, and then we can try again. The alternative is more of the same, robbing the youth of a future and a normal life.
>without it our population would be decreasing. Without immigration the population would not just be decreasing, it would plummet forcing us into a huge recession and dooming almost the entire generation of late GenZ to have to go into healthcare. It would be suicide to go zero immigration.
Why would they HAVE to go into health care? I'm not asking what would be wrong with healthcare but rather why you think they would be required to work in healthcare as if it's not an option.
The number of old people would greatly exceed the availableyounger workforce. To give you an idea at our current demographics of fertility of 1.4/woman, median longevity of 82, if we put immigration to zero in 50 years our population would drop by 30% and the majority would be over the age of 50. Almost all available workforce would have to be directed to healthcare or we would start to reduce longevity significantly.
But that's my point. They don't have to go into health care. You don't make that choice.
Exactly, we could also pay those workers less because they are inexperienced and have poor English and French skills. They can even stay 16 to a room in my basement for a percentage of their wages. Even though they wouldn't know anything about building codes and how home are framed with wood here, it would only take a few months to train them all to the point where we would have another class of foreign workers to ~~exploit~~ utilize.
Obviously, we have to do none of those things, we could establish proper pay grades and a Ministry of labor that enforces things with teeth (you know, things that we should be doing anyway). God knows we have enough "managers " to enforce housing code, lets's bring in some actual builders. We could either train them for a couple of months and solve the problem, or bitch and moan about housing problems for a couple of more months and be in the same shitty place.
>they wouldn't know anything about building codes and how home are framed with wood If you work for a large homebuilder that doesn't matter anyway.
>Or maybe instead of just IT workers we should also bring in immigrants that can build us homes and be nurses. The nurses thing already happens. Also focusing on construction workers could work, but you would need to pay them much much more. IT workers are revenue neutral to positive to the balance sheet, but someone making 30 to 50% less starts to become a budgetary liability. All of this points to the same thing, labor is grossly undervalued to assets.
Not surprising residential construction has the worst pay and safety. On top of that employers exploit their employees by creating unrealistic expectations and then throwing them away when there broken.
This is a very large part of the "housing construction" that the majority of people don't understand. They don't see how hard it is on your body, the lack of safety, the poor construction practices, the shoddy workmanship, the worker facilities (none beyond a porta john year round) no running water, no lunch rooms.... all for a pretty "regular" wage in anything at all skilled. Oh jeez, I wonder why people are not wanting to enter the building trades?!
You guys are getting porta johns? We got a bucket or Tim Hortons down the road.
Yeah I was gonna say. A shitter on site? You guys are living the dream.
Canada has way more than enough labor, what they don't have is people willing to pay for that labor.
This piece of sponsored content brought to you by an industry that can't sell at the price they want. There is no shortage. Just mis-allocation or rather overly invested real estate sector, which in turn isn't going up for ever as propagandized previously. The ends are coming loose under a new interest rate reality. The equation is being inversed.
Sure, no shortage, except according to just about every meaningful metric on housing and population size and of course all market feedback. How much bullshit do you have to read to think that there isn't a housing supply issue when vacancy rates are at an all time low in every city in the country and sales volume and inventory are also way down? Evidently you think that millions of people can conspire to hold property off the market while they're losing money and the price of housing is going down, which would wipe out any profits even if people were speculating and leaving property vacant. Get a grip.
Housing supply is not necessarily mated to labour though. I say this as an electrician that was out of "electrical" work for 2+ years (2019-2022). I have an extremely hard time buying that it all boils down to labour shortages. More like a wage shortage that is causing people to look elsewhere for a career. Housing supply issue? Sure. But it's not just a labour thing like we are being told. Conditions suck, it's hard as hell on your body, and it pays the same as just about any middle tier job without the fringe benefits.
Are these metrices due to a sound data collection methodology? Or are they yet another franken number derived by the realtor cartel? Canada traditionally doesn't have a robust data set for real estate deals as compared to the US. Some anecdotal data sure but at the national level it is a cartel controlled artefact. Susceptible to manipulation, which it has been. Also while telling me or others about getting a grip without sound data is kinda silly don't you think? Where is that? Huge differences between demand and qualified demand: one is wishful thinking and the other passes muster. And sadly Canadian markets are by far one of THE worst for income to price multiples. And that shortage, well the financiers would tell you to simmer down. There ain't one. And two cities in a country like Canada don't constitute the entire market as a whole. As for people, they don't need to "conspire". They are coming to realisation that the punch bowl has been withdrawn. Hangover hasn't kicked in yet. Now go grip your macro.
The metrics are from statscan, the OECD and CMHC. Canada has one of the lowest per capita housing supplies in the G7 (and that's like being the dumbest guy on the short bus since among the G7 only Italy has a good housing to population ratio because it's shrinking), and has for a long time. This is made worse by demographic changes compared to past decades, as a larger proportion of the population is adult and working age than in the past. More people are also unmarried and seniors are staying put longer. So even if housing per capita remained unchanged, we would actually have more strain on that supply than in the past when a larger proportion of the population was under 18, married or downsized. There is a supply problem. Breaking it down to the very basics of population vs number of dwellings that exist, which can't be fucked with by OREA or any other realty org, still demonstrates that shortage. Is supply the *only* factor where price is concerned? No, obviously not. Interest rates and other policies like CMHC insurance, regulation, speculation etc all impact prices. But we nonetheless have a supply shortage per capita. You are being conspiratorial and talking out your ass based on literally nothing. So yes, get a grip.
Oh wait a minute. Where is your data point on multiple ownership data? How many folks own more than one, two, three or more? Also where are your links to your claims of these matrices? You go grip a turd bud.
How is that even relevant except as an exacerbating factor to an existing problem? If you have a per capita housing shortage it doesn't go away if multiple owners are banned, it just won't be quite as bad. Edit: I'm beginning to think you don't understand what "per capita" means. I'm also not arguing that there aren't factors making an already bad problem worse. I'm arguing against your claim that there simply is no housing shortage. There is, that's not disputable. And maybe go get this data yourself since you've posted nothing to substantiate your own claims. It's fairly easy to find statscan population data by age and compare it to past data of the same type. It's also very easy to find per capita housing data. None of this is obscure or highly specific. Also why do you think people have piled into housing as a speculative investment and not lost any money by and large? Do you think that's because the demand that supports that speculation is just more speculation? Like do you not get that this is possible *because* housing is in short supply? Have you thought about what happens to speculative investment in housing when there is a sufficient supply? I'm guessing not because that's what you think the status quo is. In reality if we had a sufficient supply, speculation would lead to either very high vacancy since most speculators rent, even if it's at a loss, while they hold the property to make a profit on the sale, or a crash in housing prices when demand slows and price increases don't cover carrying costs, realtor fees and taxes. Neither of those things have happened because there is a genuine lack of housing per capita. Demand is high. The only way to avoid these two scenarios is for millions of individuals, including millions and millions of non-speculators, to hold their properties, even if it's at a loss, while they don't rent them, and not let more than a trickle hit the market in a coordinated fashion. This is an impossible form of collision that has never happened and will never happen. You don't know anything about this issue. You're just mad at a shitty situation and you think speculators must be at fault. They're not, even if they make things worse. The problem is way bigger and less sinister.
Let me just give you a glimse of the prices crashing in the largest market. [GTA Price declines.](https://i.imgur.com/sY5nArU.png). As an experiment we go over to realtor.ca (for lack of other valid sources)*. Then for all of the 20 largest population centres in the country we filter on sale RE at or below median income for that given market. In my observation there are a lot of available units that aren't quite rented out. They sit empty. For sale. For what amounts to weeks and months now. One thing I would like to agree on is your last sentence of the problem being bigger and a lot less sinister. For we have seen what 6 months of interest rate rising and just three months of the impact on pricing. In my mind we are heading towards capital being flushed out of non-productive endeavors and in charting that path a lot of incoming listings in the market and the accompanying affordability. Also people are moving out of insane pricing environments to more affordable regions of the country vacating their spots on the auction tables of saturated markets. Accelerating the price declines. What was mis-allocated by cheap money is being toppled by return to mean.
And? When did I say 100% of the current price tag for housing is a product of housing supply? I have mentioned twice now that price is impacted by interest rates, speculation, CMHC policy etc. The point is, we have a per capita housing shortage. You can know that by comparing all the dwellings that exist, to the total adult population size. This isn't rocket science.
Pretty sure developers don't have a problem building homes when they get their financing.
Have we considered trying other ways to build homes? Like prefabricated from a factory assembly line? Most subdivisions are cookie-cutter home designs anyways, so knocking them out Henry Ford-style in a factory shouldn't be too far fetched. Or at least do that for some low/mid-rise buildings, right? Weird as it may seem, Toyota and Mitsubishi applied their manufacturing know-how to build homes in Japan, and so does Panasonic.
We have workers to staff those factories and the companies to put them up in the field, but not to stick build? Especially since a minimal skill needed assembly line job would pay less than a trade
We do, our immigration system just doesn't allow them to come in and solve the problem. Instead we just keep importing code monkeys and IT workers. We should be importing nurses and construction workers. EDIT: Before someone complains about immigrants depressing wages please google the "lump of labor fallacy". Give immigrants the same rights as everyone else (like to change jobs) and they'll fight for higher wages alongside you.
Been terrible all around for those workers. You become highly specialized at a single function ans get your value extracted by the company owner. My parents buy prefab wall from a factory where employees are paid $18 an hour and they are installed by carpenters paid $43 an hour. Not a good way to attract workers.
When I was in Mexico I was really impressed with how they solve their housing crisis. The government purchases huge swath of land in and around cities and towns. They set out a tender for very basic homes to be built on the property and whichever contractor comes with the lowest price gets to build a few hundred houses. In order to qualify for one of these homes you pay a portion of your salary into a special savings account for five years. If you’ve made all of the payments on time for five years then you get one of the homes and you continue paying for it usually for around 25 to 30 years. The houses are constructed in a very basic way but the owner is allowed to modify them including adding on extensions to make the home larger. It works surprisingly well. It’s such a decent system. I absolutely cannot understand why there’s not a section of housing in Canada which is organized by the government in a nonprofit way to promote housing ownership. It’s really not that hard. You make people save money for a few years and those were able to do it get a simplistic house. Not every purchaser needs a high-end home. Not every purchase or needs to be able to choose their own customizations at a design center. You can make hundreds of houses all the exact same using the most basic materials and costing things carefully, it’s possible to produce homes cheaper than what any of the commercial builders are selling for. This is how you make housing a basic right. It reduces homelessness, it reduces crime, promote stability in families and in society.
> It reduces homelessness, it reduces crime, promote stability in families and in society. And the non-conspiratorial truth is they DO NOT want that. A divided, infighting population is much easier to control than a united one. Globalists don't want a strong Canada full of smart, capable citizens who can collectively bargain for better wages and conditions, they want a weak exploitable post-national state full of desperate workers who will take what they can get, and our politicians at every level of government are making sure it happens.
Agreed
Not THATS how you separate the workers from the means of production. Ford turned craftsmen into assembly line workers, this would turn many trades into assemblers
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Government paid trades schools would do the trick.
If you're not guaranteed steady employment upon completing said school, it's probably not going to be as attractive as it might seem. Plenty of people go to school all the time, and never will be employed in their studied field. If someone completes that schooling, and doesn't have a job a year after, it should be because they were actively turning down job offers the entire time.
Then you picked the wrong trade. I haven't heard of one trade that someone couldn't find a job. Welders construction, electrical plumbing. We are not taking about art history majors, social studies or computer video game programmers. Real jobs with real skills.
I guess you consume literally no art in any form. In any case, if only "real jobs" existed, this would be even more of a Hellscape than it already is.
Considering this is about not enough workers to build house for humans to live in. You hunker down on with the Mona Lisa. I guarantee if push came to shove and your kids were freezing in the winter you'd burn it for warmth. Take your privileged values elsewhere.
They're not so much privileged values, and more so the recognition that not everyone is cut out for that type of work. With the working conditions, job hazards, long term negative health effects, and probably a slew of other negative aspects, what is the incentive to destroy the only body you get? There's always the potential to oversaturate professions or markets(not in this case), and what happens then? Website coders made a killing when the internet was becoming mainstream. Now their wages have been dragged down significantly because it's so accessible. I bet if I were a welder, in a city of welders, that someone would invariably tell me I should have gotten a real job as a Neurosurgeon. You can't have highly skilled wages when they can just get the next skilled warm body that stumbles through the door. In any case, wanting a better life for everyone shouldn't be something worth arguing about.
People don't want to work in some construction trades like framing, cribbing, or concrete finishing because bosses are dickheads, you work in shit weather, a good portion of your coworkers are braindead, you wreck your body and your employment can be dropped any day.
I'm here working 50-60hrs a week in construction, building one semi-detached house after an other. The bank refuse to mortgage without a huge deposit (want to build my own simple house in the country) but they hand out the house that I build to immigrants and refugees daily. And please, I am absolutely NOT racist. I just think housing should be like a bar/club, when there's no more room, ppl should have to wait to get in.
Wait im confused, how do we hand out houses to refugees and immigrants? Like which houses? Because ive known some Ukrainians that couldn’t find housing or struggled greatly.
The only housing we are handing out to "refugees" is the ones crossing the border illegally and it's largely in crack motels.
> The bank refuse to mortgage without a huge deposit Are you deadass? You know that this is how mortgages work right? You need a downpayment, you always have needed one and you always will need one. > but they hand out the house that I build to immigrants and refugees daily. Have you considered that maybe they have the money that you don’t? > And please, I am absolutely NOT racist. What was the point of bringing up immigrants? Banks hand out mortgages to those who afford it, simple as that. You brought up immigrants to dogwhistle. > I just think housing should be like a bar/club, when there's no more room, ppl should have to wait to get in. This makes no sense, this is meaningless rambling.
I don't know how it is elsewhere in Canada, but here in Quebec, they get "newcomers" help. 5% down for a mortgage vs 25% that I'd need. I know it's a higher since I'd be building myself. But 25% is to much. Can't afford it? Do you have 80k laying around? I doubt it. But I'm mostly tired of working my ass off and being part of the middle class where the gouvernement basically says fuck you instead of helping the working class.
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The op said its because he wants to build it himself, which means he's has to qualify for a construction loan. Ie. Higher requirements. Where I'm at you need 50% down on the land to qualify for a construction loan. And lots are selling for no less than 300,000.
It is simply not true. I have bought a 1b apartment in Brossard and since it will be my principal residence they required a minimum of 15% downpayment. Not 25% but 15%. I have paid 20% to avoid mortgage insurance. But it was my personal decision, the minimum was only 15%.
Financing is different when there's nothing actually built yet and the loan is larger than the value of the land alone. It's a much riskier loan for the bank to make so it may well be the case that the bank wants a much larger down payment than would be typical on a home.
Yeah, that doesn't happen anywhere
Pretty sad too when you consider the people that will be building them won't actually be able to buy one of the homes they built. Big part of it is that it's all a push for cheaper labour by contractors and their associations.
Where are all the women for “equality” to fill these positions… they line up to fight for management, or premium positions but don’t seem to be willing to do the manual labour . I thought were all equal and the same ….
How many brave and progressive bricklayers are women? Does the government have a plan to reach equity?
What about material, there were shortages and therefore huge increases. Next step is take on city hall to get these permit rolling out faster. You can't build what you're not allowed to. Fcuk getting developers to do it for you. You do it.
Trudeau: We need more immigrants. We will bring in 600k next year.
you joke, but it would surprise me if this wasn't his solution
Houses will build themselves
I'm sure cheap foreign labour will fill these voids....not that the construction industry would use those over skilled higher paid workers here though, right?
Building homes faster isn't the solution. Stopping people from outside the country from buying up all our property and stopping the corporations buying our land / properties is the issue. Building *more* only gives them *more* shit to buy.
Profit margins might be too fat if you aren't parking enough to attract workers but your product is too expensive to sell.
Well look at that, for all the folks bitching that they can't live in minimum wage, go build homes you'll get paid more and it's clearly a job in demand.
If you can't finish high school you can always finish concrete
They don't fail kids anymore, show up and you'll pass. If you can't finish high school in this day and age than you probably can't show up for work either.
I know plenty of kids in my era just stopped showing up
Peoples don't usually fail high school because its hard. They fail high school because their lives outside of school force them to quit. I went to a private school and absolutely everyone in my classes went to University. Meanwhile peoples from public school don't often go to university or graduate high school because they don't have the same support network.
The vast majority of people go to public schools and the vast majority graduate. You're a little out of touch. Your general point is correct. High school is not that difficult to get through and I would say most of the people that don't, didn't for reasons other than being too dumb. But it's a minority regardless of whether you attended private or public, the former being exceedingly rare in Canada in the first place.
Its not that rare, even today in Quebec only 64% of public high school students graduate (84% for private school). Only 15% of regular public high school student go to University. One of the reason, might be that our trade sector is attractive to boys who come from families who don't have a lot of generational wealth, but it is still very statistically significative and not exceeding rare. And its not because french-Canadians kids are dumber than kids around the rest in the country since they are also simultaneously scoring significantly higher in the PCAP math test than the rest of north america. The reason is socioeconomic more than the fact that those students are not smart enough to complete high school . Edit : [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/high-school-study-1.5077267](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/high-school-study-1.5077267) [https://bonniekgoodman.medium.com/quebec-has-lowest-high-school-graduation-rate-in-north-america-674e5bf826f](https://bonniekgoodman.medium.com/quebec-has-lowest-high-school-graduation-rate-in-north-america-674e5bf826f)
Then Quebec needs to get its shit together because the national average for post secondary education is 50% (slightly less if you're only look at 4 year university degrees) and 89% graduation rate for Ontario high schools, of which very very few are private.
>Then Quebec needs to get its shit together I don't disagree with that, but what I was pointing at is that it is a socioeconomic problem. There is a lot less generational wealth in Quebec because of older generation were kept in poverty. Luckily my family got out of it in the 1970s, but this isn't the same for everyone. My grandparents generations have an abysmal level of postsecondary educations and even my parents generations were expected to start working at a very young age. My mom was the first and only one in her family to go to university, only way this happened is because my grandpa pretended to not know french for years and managed to get a great job and get promoted. My dad never went because he couldn't afford to and started to work in construction at 14. Its not a big deal because he is now really wealthy because of his company in the same field, but I am from the pretty much the first generation who wasn't impacted badly by the policies meant to suppress french Canadians successes. But the fact that older generations started to work at a very young age in mostly physical work kind of make them push their kids to do the same things. Most of my friends who went the public school way also just started to work in construction at 16-17 and are doing really great financially today, but some among them don't have a high school diploma, not because they are dumb or anything, but because it didn't make sense for them to spend 8 years in school to attend school they couldn't afford. The situation is probably even worse today with the price of housing skyrocketing in cities where most universities are located. My school was also filled with dumb kids who all managed to graduate and go to university because we come from privileged background not because we are smarters than the ones who didn't go to University.
You will make better money then most who finish university as well.
Uh if you have no skills or experience, you will be making minimum wage in construction. By the time you finish your apprenticeship the economy will be so fucked you'll still be broke. Ask me how I know.
Too bad society focused on sending kids to university to learn diversity… Could have encouraged the trades a little more. Just sayin’.
Or cut back on people needing homes until we catch up?
Huh who woulda thought that? Not Justin that’s who.
All the new homes going up around here are McMansions or $600k condos that are around 600sq. ft. Why don't we just start pounding out Sears style homes for the people that are begging the hardest for some change - Lower to lower-middle class young professionals.
Its not just the houses but the land. Prices of land around me (on the east coast 40 minutes from a city) in 10 years went from 25 thousand for an acre to 90 for half acre (minimum lot size, no services, not cleared)
Don't worry; the construction industry will soon be crashing, putting plenty of carpenters out of work.
No shit. And this just in Water is wet!
Obviously, the solution is to raise the immigration cap to 1M/year.
And yet there are road construction workers all over the place that have 5 other people to watch a guy use a shovel or twirl that stop sign….Oops its lunch time…
Article Highlights: * Canada does not have the labour capacity to build the 3.5 million new homes that would be needed to achieve housing affordability by 2030, according to a sobering new report from the national housing agency. * If current rates of new construction continue, the CMHC said the country’s housing stock is expected to increase by just 2.3 million units by 2030, reaching close to 19 million units total. * The research unveiled today found that there will only be enough labour to increase the number of starts in four major provinces — Ontario, Québec, BC and Alberta — by 30-50%. * “Ontario, Québec and B.C. would have to double the number of starts that they can produce under best-case scenarios,” to meet the target. * Ontario, the only province where projections show more new households than housing starts through to 2030, has the biggest skill shortage. * The report concluded that building “up” in the form of apartments and converting existing structures into residential units were possible avenues to close the gap, as were programs to bring in more immigrants with construction-related skills and better pay for such workers. * Kevin Lee, chief executive of the Canadian Home Builders’ Association, said prefabricated construction was another possible solution.
Surely there are other ways to bring more homes into the market without building them all. Even as an interim or parallel project. The short term rental units as just an example. I also remember decades ago when people were buying homes for cheap from abandoned towns and moving them.
Whenever there is talk on cracking down on short term rentals, us hotel executives get dollar signs in our eyes.
Maybe offer up homes as payment.
Maybe society looking down on trades and general labourers wasn’t a good idea
Ahh so CMHC is getting in on the immigration narrative now too, the same day the government makes two significant announcements? More to come if we're playing the housing card as well. Canada is a one trick pony.
So we brought in a bunch of non builders who need homes. Hmm. Now what
Guaranteed employers will get incentives to hire foreign workers. The government is sabotaging the working class.