Canada should stop punishing skilled tradespeople for going to work
Editor’s note: This article was written by Sean Strickland, the executive director of Canada’s Building Trades Unions. It was originally published in the Toronto Star on April 12. We reprint it here with permission.
Ottawa has shown, time and again, commitment to creating jobs and investing in infrastructure — through the Canada Infrastructure Bank, a one-million-jobs plan and, we hope, through infrastructure stimulus in the upcoming budget.
Recently, the Trudeau government announced it was doubling the federal Gas Tax Fund transfer and rebranding it as the Canada Community Building Fund.
If passed, an additional $2.2 billion will flow directly to cities and communities injecting much-needed capital into municipal budgets that have been hard hit by the pandemic.
Why then, are the thousands of skilled men and women who are expected to build this infrastructure not given equal treatment to deduct work-related travel expenses?
National infrastructure projects require a highly skilled and mobile workforce moving from construction site to construction site across Canada. Yet our Income Tax Act does not let this vital workforce deduct expenses such as meals or accommodation connected with travel to work sites — while this same century-old law would permit them to claim those expenses if they were travelling to the same sites to perform professional services like accounting.
This difference in treatment defies common sense at a time when Canada is stimulating its economy to recover from the pandemic and focus on climate change.
Not only is this archaic legislation unfair to the skilled men and women we are counting on to build this badly needed infrastructure, it does not address the skilled-labour shortage experienced in some jurisdictions, high unemployment in others and the job creation we need to recover from the pandemic.
This is why all parliamentarians should support a private member’s bill by NDP MP Scott Duvall, whose measures would incorporate a Skilled Trades Workforce Mobility program into our tax system. Bill C-275, if passed, would allow for expenses for trades people travelling more than 80 kilometres to a job site to be tax deductible.
Unfortunately, placement in the Order of Precedence in the House of Commons makes it unlikely Bill C-275 will be debated in this session of Parliament. As a result, Canada’s Building Trades Unions (CBTU) are calling on the federal government to adopt and implement this bill.
Currently, we have thousands of unemployed construction workers in Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador because of the energy sector’s hardships — yet infrastructure projects in B.C. and Nova Scotia are facing shortages of skilled tradespeople at the same time.
Until we have a Skilled Trades Workforce Mobility program to remove a serious policy imbalance, absurdities like this will continue. So will steep disincentives and barriers to the mobile construction workforce that Canada needs.
The CBTU recently commissioned a report estimating that estimates it costs an average construction worker more than $4,000 to temporarily relocate for work.
The report, conducted by accounting firm Hendry Warren LLP, found that the Skilled Trades Workforce Mobility Tax Deduction would save that worker $2,532 a year — and it also found Ottawa would save $347 million per year, by putting more Canadians to work, reducing EI payments and increasing tax revenues.
During the 41st Parliament, a virtually identical private member’s bill, was defeated on second reading by the Conservatives. The Liberals voted with the NDP in May 2014 to support it, including a new MP at the time, Chrystia Freeland.
Let’s get on with replacing the million jobs we lost in the pandemic.
The April 19 budget would be a fitting time to make this right.
Sean Strickland is executive director of Canada’s Building Trades Unions, an alliance of 14 international unions in the construction, maintenance and fabrication industries that collectively represent over half a million skilled tradespeople in Canada.