Tim Hudak is right about one thing: The world doesn't need protection from freedom-loving hairdressers. But otherwise the Ontario Progressive Conservative leader's latest policy initiative comes across as just one more episode in an increasingly surreal debate about a supposed lack of skilled tradespeople in Canada – a labour shortage that no one can prove actually exists.
The target of Mr. Hudak's ire this week was the Ontario College of Trades, an organization set up by the provincial government to regulate more than 100 blue-collar occupations ranging from drywall finishers to sprinkler installers. At a press event, Mr. Hudak lambasted the college as an expensive, job-killing bureaucracy that is throttling the entry of eager workers into the jobs it regulates.
To prove his point, he was accompanied by a young hairdresser who is being threatened with the loss of her licence because she has flunked the college-mandated written exam for her chosen occupation half a dozen times – a clear example to Mr. Hudak's mind of needless government interference in people's lives. "We don't need an expensive government bureaucracy to tell people where to get their hair cut," he said.
Let's give him that one. And let's acknowledge that the College of Trades does seem like a busybody's dream, where bureaucrats can spend their days drafting rules to ensure that nobody gets confused by the important distinction between "ironworker-generalist" and "ironworker-structural and ornamental." But, even with those problems in mind, does it really make sense to assume, as Mr. Hudak apparently does, that knocking down the barriers to working in the trades would result in a flood of new tradespeople and a swell of job creation?
Probably not. Behind his assertions is a belief that government regulations are needlessly constricting apprenticeship opportunities and therefore the supply of skilled tradespeople, choking off economic growth. Similar logic is frequently repeated by employers' groups, which like to warn that not enough young people are headed into the trades. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business, one of the louder voices in this debate, says than surveys of its small-business members show that nearly a third of them are suffering from a shortage of skilled labour.
But can the problem really be all that bad? Here's a reality test: Look at people's paycheques.
Labour shortages usually translate into soaring wages as employers bid against each other for workers. But Statistics Canada reports that wage increases for skilled tradespeople in the construction industry, such as plumbers and electricians, have only barely outpaced the pay gains for labourers in the same sector over the past seven years. That is not what you would expect to see if there were a desperate shortage of skilled workers.
The employers who report shortages of qualified candidates are no doubt sincere, but such surveys have a rather predictable habit of overestimating the tightness of the labour market, according to a report from the Certified General Accountants Association of Canada. The study, published in 2012, found that "where sufficient data exists, an assessment shows that [skilled] labour shortages occurred rather sporadically and did not persist for more than a year at a time over the past 10 years."
There is little evidence, in other words, to make anyone suspect that there is a serious and sustained lack of skilled labour in Canada. Mr. Hudak may be right to take aim at an expensive bureaucracy, but ending the College of Trades is unlikely to have any larger impact – unless, that is, you're in the market for a new hairdresser.
Ian McGugan