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Demand for Trade Work Has Never Been Higher. Why Is It Impossible to Find a Job?
Devin Gera grew up fixing things. He loved motocross, so the twenty-four-year-old was used to repairing machinery from an early age.
Key points- Ontario needs 100,000 new construction workers by the end of the decade
- Factors like low wages, frustrating administrative processes, and unsteady work often discourage apprentices from completing training
- Provincial funds set aside for skills development has been recklessly allocated, but federal support appears promising
After a stint studying to be an automotive technician at his high school in Hamilton, Ontario, Gera set his sights on the manufacturing engineering technician program at Mohawk College. He would be a millwright, like his father and grandfather.
He graduated last year, joined a large company, and finished 8,000 hours of mandatory apprenticeship training. It was time to write his certification test with Skilled Trades Ontario (STO), the provincial agency established in 2022. Like many, he did not pass on his first try. On his second attempt, he received a notice that he had failed again, with a grade of 1 percent.
When he called STO, he says, they told him the third-party contractor that handles the exams had lost his test paper. Because it was impossible to input a score of zero into the system, someone had logged a grade of 1 percent and called it a day, he recalls the representative explaining. He would not be getting a refund. Gera was forced to take the test a third time—shelling out another $169.50—and finally passed with his certification after months of trying.
Gera is one of an untold number of workers navigating a frustrating administrative process, financial pressures, and difficulty finding employers willing to take them on as apprentices. Now in his first year as a certified millwright, Gera says the path to get there was incredibly frustrating. “It’s a great job and everything,” he says. “I just don’t think the government’s making it any easier for people to get in.”
STO was created, in part, to streamline the training and certification requirements for more than 140 trade jobs. A month after Gera wrote his final exam, Sudbury New Democratic Party labour critic Jamie West called on the province to address concerns with the third-party contractor responsible for testing. With only two testing centres in Northern Ontario, he warned, prospective workers were facing months-long delays, with little recourse but to wait or travel hours to a testing centre in Mississauga. Testing centres have put many applicants on wait lists, leaving aspiring tradespeople in limbo with little communication from STO.
The certification that these workers are applying for is called a “Red Seal”—an indicator of proficiency and training in a set of registered trades that allows them to practise across the country. Testing is the final stage in a gruelling journey that involves school and thousands of hours of on-the-job training. All this can take upwards of four years, or about as long as a university degree. But unlike university students, these trainees are at the mercy of a third-party contractor to complete all the steps required to graduate into their professions.
Ontario has a vested interest in making this process as smooth as possible: the province needs 100,000 new skilled tradespeople in the construction sector alone by the end of the decade. Billions of dollars are being invested in major infrastructure projects, including the Ontario Line, Highway 413, and dozens of hospital redevelopment initiatives—not to mention countless housing construction plans. These will need skilled electricians, carpenters, welders, mechanics, and skilled workers from dozens of other trades in order to be completed.
In other words, demand has never been higher, but tradespeople are navigating a process so arduous that some of them are leaving the profession altogether.
Luckily, workers are flocking to the trades in droves. Last year, Ontario reported more than 100,000 active apprenticeship registrations, and the province has invested an additional $64 million to expand in-class training for apprentices. Stigma against working in the trades, which has historically been a significant barrier to attracting new talent, has begun to shift.
Scratch beneath these exultant figures, however, and fault lines begin to appear. Of the 100,000 active apprentices in the province, many face obstacles including unsteady work, low wages, and difficulties navigating the program requirements for their trades. Then there are more entrenched factors—gender, race, geographical disparities—that present additional barriers.
Ken Chatoor, who works as the director of research and strategic foresight at the Labour Market Information Council—a not-for-profit organization aimed at assessing Canada’s labour market—says that while the number of new apprentices is promising, the rates of people completing their training is another story.
Of the top fifteen Red Seal programs that Chatoor has tracked between 2018 and 2022, not one has an apprenticeship completion rate higher than 65 percent. “And that’s just for men,” he says. When it comes to women, depending on the trade, the numbers are often much lower. Take carpenters for example: the completion rate is 44 percent for men and 21 percent for women. For steamfitters and pipefitters, it’s 46 percent for men and 24 percent for women.
In Ontario, Chatoor says, this is a “slow motion crisis in the making.” Many skilled tradespeople are aging out of their professions, and researchers have been looking at something called an “age replacement ratio”—the number of workers over fifty-five compared with those under.
“The places where we see the lowest age replacement ratio is in manufacturing and utilities,” Chatoor says. “There’s a ratio of 2.75 young people for every mature worker. That’s not a lot.” That means a quarter of the workforce in these trades is likely to retire in the near future. He compares this to health care, where there are 4.5 young people for every mature worker.
“That tells us we have a really disproportionately older workforce,” he says. Not only are employers losing qualified tradespeople to retirement, but apprentices are losing would-be mentors as well.
And that’s just one factor. Canadians are largely in the dark about how many skilled tradespeople we are losing in the middle of their careers to factors such as burnout, injury, financial issues, experiences of discrimination on the job, or to consequences resulting from these factors. In Ontario, construction workers made up almost one in thirteen opioid-related deaths between 2017 and 2020. A combination of on-the-job injuries, a culture of working through the pain, and unstable access to treatment, among other things, are thought to contribute to the high death rate.
The provincial government, to its credit, has long recognized the need to address the problems of access and retention in the skilled trades workforce. This is why, in 2021, it began allocating billions of dollars in grants through a special fund to support training and employment initiatives in the skilled trades. The province also earmarked another $1 billion over the next three years to help industries struggling from the impact of United States president Donald Trump’s tariffs.
This Skills Development Fund might have been a rare feather in the cap of Ontario premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative Party. But in late 2025, auditor general Shelley Spence found that much of the $1.3 billion of the fund had been recklessly allocated.
According to Spence, more than half the programs chosen to receive funding had been ranked below the benchmarks set out by the Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Skills Development. Minister David Piccini’s office had gone against internal recommendations, awarding $126 million in funding to companies that ranked “low” or “medium” in their applications.
An analysis by The Trillium found that, of the money allocated to for-profit businesses in the fourth and fifth rounds of funding, 80 percent had been given to companies that were led by donors to the PC Party. At least two recipients were being investigated by the Ontario Provincial Police for their role in the scandal.
There are, however, more promising interventions on the horizon. In April, the federal government earmarked $6 billion over five years to support skilled trades. This includes subsidies up to $10,000 for hiring apprentices, expanding union-run training centres, a weekly income top-up for apprentices attending technical training, and a one-time bonus of $5,000 for apprentices who successfully get certified in a Red Seal trade. In total, the program aims to attract 100,000 new workers and halve the time it takes to get certified.
It has yet to be seen how this will play out in Ontario. What is certain is that, for the thousands of young people working toward a future in the trades, help cannot come soon enough.
The post Demand for Trade Work Has Never Been Higher. Why Is It Impossible to Find a Job? first appeared on The Walrus.
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