Jeff Griffiths and Janet Lane

Published in the Calgary Herald

February 18, 2025

As every renter and would-be homebuyer knows, Alberta has a housing shortage — and to keep homes relatively affordable, it needs to build more of them, fast.

Governments at all levels are working to make this possible. The Alberta government is doing its part through the 10-year Stronger Foundations affordable housing strategy. Municipal governments are working to expand the number of possible homebuilding sites. Meanwhile, last year, the federal government announced a plan to build up to 3.7 million homes by 2031.

However, the biggest obstacle to getting this many homes built is a shortage of people with the skills needed for residential construction. To this end, the federal government has also invested heavily in skills training for people enrolled in Red Seal (that is, interprovincially recognized) trades apprenticeships. But this training will not make much of a difference to residential construction.

This is because although there are Red Seal-certified apprentices and journeypersons working in residential construction, hundreds of thousands of workers directly involved in home building are not. In fact, they may not have followed any formal apprenticeship at all — which doesn’t mean they aren’t skilled, just that there isn’t any official certification of those skills.

Some trades are compulsory — you must be either an apprentice or a journeyperson in that trade to be allowed to do the work. In residential construction in Alberta, there are only two compulsory trades — electrician and plumber. Consequently, there are few Alberta apprenticeships with a specific homebuilding focus. Formal training (and certification) may be available but it is voluntary for the majority of occupations involved in the sector. While a good proportion of individuals working in the sector may have completed a formal apprenticeship in a construction trade; others may have started but not completed, and others may have learned their skills informally on the job.

While learning the full scope of skills involved in a four-year Red Seal apprenticeship may be ideal, the reality is that skills demanded in the residential sector are usually a subset of the full scope of trade. The result is that many construction apprentices drop out of their learning programs, which are generally four years long. Statistics Canada has shown that of those who began carpentry apprenticeships in 2017, 49 per cent discontinued their formal training. The proportion of roofers who discontinued was 57 per cent and of painters, 59 per cent.

Recent data is not available, but a decade ago about a third of people who discontinued their apprenticeships were still working in the industry, because even partial training gave them the skills they needed to make a good living.

There should be a system to recognize the skills of these workers. As we wrote a decade ago in Building Blocks: Modular Stackable Credentials for Canada’s Trades, what was needed then — and is even more necessary now — is a way to provide transferable, competency-based certification for people who are skilled but do not require a journeyman ticket or the complete Red Seal to work well in their trade. This would be complementary to the Red Seal and, importantly, would not prevent an individual from completing a full Red Seal certification in the future.

This recognition would encourage more employers and workers to access the subsidies available in the formal apprenticeship system. It would also allow for consistent standards, formal mentoring and monitoring of trainees by other competent individuals, and a high potential for improving the safety, quality and productivity metrics in the sector. Ultimately, it can help attract more workers to the residential construction sector at a time when they are sorely needed.

That, more than anything else, would get desperately needed new homes built better, faster and more economically.

Jeff Griffiths is director of the Skills, Innovation and Productivity Centre at Canada West Foundation. Janet Lane is a senior fellow at the Canada West Foundation.