Between October 2020 and May 2024, Canada’s construction, manufacturing, and utilities sectors experienced labour shortages averaging more than 129,000 employees per year—nearly 50,000 more vacancies than the average between 2017 and 2020.

Since 2017, labour demand in Canada’s construction, manufacturing, and utilities sectors—much of which involve skilled trades—has trended upwards each year. Labour demand is a measure of the total of an industry's employed workers and its unfilled jobs. For instance, between 2017 and 2023, “peak season” (July to December) demand for construction, manufacturing, and utilities workers rose by 260,326, from 2.79 million to more than 3 million (9.3 percent).

Demand for workers in general, and skilled tradespeople in particular, spiked with the end of the pandemic and the economies of the world reopening, Bill Ferreira, executive director of the construction industry group Build Force Canada, told The Hub.

“The number of major projects under construction across Canada—from utilities in British Columbia, pipelines in B.C. and Alberta, public transit and manufacturing in Ontario, to health-care projects in nearly every province—underscored the strong demand for labour, particularly in residential construction,” he said. Residential construction, in particular, was supported by low interest rates and national housing demand, he added.

During this period, the number of construction, manufacturing and utilities workers failed to keep pace with growing demand.

Between the peak seasons of 2017 and 2023, actual employment in those sectors rose by 225,947 from 2.7 million to 2.9 million. In 2023, the number of job vacancies—the difference between the sectors’ labour demand and the number of people working in it—in the peak season averaged approximately 107,600. The average vacancy rate in 2017’s peak season was about 73,300.

Another way to understand these trends is to compare vacancies in construction, manufacturing, and utilities before and after the pandemic. Between October 2020 and May 2024, the average number of vacancies in the sectors was 129,520. That’s 49,400 more vacancies than the average between January 2017 and March 2020.

Because of these vacancies, in 2022 over 60 percent of Canadian manufacturers were forced to lose or turn down contracts, resulting in the manufacturing sector losing $13 billion, according to Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters.

From their improved bargaining position, construction workers’ average wages have risen, while the average length of employment before finding more competitively waged work has fallen, both relative to the whole economy, according to a 2023 report from CIBC.

Construction labour’s rising scarcity and the resulting cost is a key challenge in meeting the federal government’s goal of building 22 million housing units by 2030, which is required to make Canadian housing more affordable according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Canada is now on track to build just 18.2 million units by 2030, down from the 18.6 million predicted in 2022.

Of the years between 2017 and 2024, 2022 had, on average, the largest number of vacancies—162,367 workers—in the construction, manufacturing, and utilities sectors. In 2023, the average number of vacancies declined to 118,278 as demand slowed and the labour supply grew.

Between 2022 and 2023, construction, manufacturing, and utilities demand grew only about 11,000, while the supply of workers grew by about 55,700. The vacancy rate in 2023 therefore declined.

In April 2022, the vacancy rate in the construction, manufacturing, and utilities sectors peaked at 6.55 percent. Last December, the rate was back down to 2.57 percent, its lowest since December 2019.

“Rising interest rates have significantly cooled demand for new housing, as well as the home renovation market,” Ferreria explained for 2023’s relatively cool growth in labour demand, allowing workers to catch up somewhat and the rate of vacancy relative to demand to fall.

The completion or near-completion of major projects like the Trans Mountain Expansion, Coastal GasLink, Site C Hydro Development, and LNG Canada—each in British Columbia—and the Gordie Howe Bridge in Ontario, as well as post-pandemic federal programs to increase the number of tradespeople, have likewise eased demand and boosted employment in construction’s non-residential workforce, said Ferreria.

“To improve the current situation and ensure that the construction industry can continue to keep pace with rising demands across Canada, ongoing industry career promotion is essential. There must also be a continued focus on broadening traditional recruitment efforts to include individuals from under-represented groups in the construction workforce,” he said.

“Additionally, faster methods of recognizing the foreign credentials of newcomers, such as competency-based recognition assessments consistent with prevailing Canadian Red Seal standards, and improved pathways for newcomers with skilled trades experience to immigrate to Canada, will be required for the foreseeable future.”

U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Cohen says Canadians are consuming too much American news, which he believes is “unhealthy” because of American legacy media’s polarizing and partisan nature.

He added that it’s come at the expense of Canadians consuming news about their own country’s politics.

Cohen made the comments during a recent interview with The Hub’s managing editor, Harrison Lowman.

When asked about Canadians’ apparent obsession and preoccupation with the political news of the United States, Cohen, who is a former Comcast media executive, explained that he finds Canada’s consumption of American news from CNN, MSNBC, and Fox to be somewhat strange.

“I do think it is odd, particularly when I contrast it to the United States, where…virtually no one in the United States is paying any attention to Canadian politics,” he said.

“Every major Canadian household has easy access to American cable television news,” he noted.

“I’ll be honest with you, before I came here…Canadian cable television news outlets, I didn’t even know how to get them in the United States,” he added.

According to new statistics from the Reuters Institute, a significant number of Canadians, particularly in English Canada, rely on American outlets like CNN and the New York Times on a weekly basis for news.

In 2018, Canada was the biggest foreign market for the New York Times, making up around 27 percent of its total foreign audience. In an interview with Canadaland, the then New York Times Canada bureau chief said the paper’s Canadian audience hovered around 94,000.

In 2024, a New York Times press release announced the paper had reached two million international subscriptions, highlighting that it has “seen subscriber growth in recent years” in Canada. Some estimates have claimed the New York Times has more paying Canadian digital subscribers than any Canadian news outlet.

A Canadian fixation with America

Within our borders, Canadian media outlets have also become fixated on American politics.

True North reported that Canada’s public broadcaster CBC published 68 stories about the Kamala Harris campaign in one month. Back in 2020, CBC published 500 percent more stories about Harris than about Leslyn Lewis, a black woman running for federal office in Canada.

CBC has also held U.S. election night TV specials for the 2020 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

“World coverage has been a hallmark of CBC News since the public broadcaster was founded, and we dedicate more resources to international reporting than any other media outlet in Canada,” CBC general manager and editor-in-chief Brodie Fenlon recently explained in an article justifying the public broadcaster’s coverage of U.S. politics.

“​​Within our coverage of the world, the United States occupies a special place for some obvious reasons,” he added. “From arts and culture, national security, the economy to the environment—our countries are inextricably linked.”

As previously reported by The Hub, Canada’s politics are growing more and more Americanized.

Slanted news

Ambassador Cohen said even American outlets themselves have what he considers to be “an unhealthy preoccupation with American politics.”

“You’re getting an unfiltered and 24/7 perspective on the political structure from all of these cable television news outlets, without the balancing perspective of lots of people around you who have different opinions and who can balance a little bit what you’re seeing on a cable television news show,” he explained.

“I do think it’s unhealthy,” said Cohen, admitting that for his own mental health he took an intentional break from his country’s political news channels this summer.

According to media analysts, America’s “Big Three” news channels—Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC—all have political biases.

The AllSides bias checker rates Fox News as having a right-wing bias, CNN as having a bias that leans Left, and MSNBC as having a left-wing bias.

Meanwhile, many American newsrooms are lacking ideological diversity. According to a 2022 Syracuse University study, just 3.4 percent of American journalists now describe themselves as Republicans, while 36.4 percent describe themselves as Democrats.

“I come from Pennsylvania… [which] I think has been properly identified as maybe the battleground state in the upcoming election,” said Cohen. “So I can’t go anywhere in Pennsylvania where I don’t find equal numbers of people who have very different political opinions than what is being carried on MSNBC and, to a large extent, on CNN.”

“It’s just not necessarily an accurate depiction of the political process and the way people think to just get your news and information from cable television news outlets,” he added.

This is not the first time that Cohen has spoken about Canada’s massive appetite for American news.

In a July interview with the Hill Times, Cohen said he believes one of the reasons why Canadians are often anxious about the United States is because of their media consumption.

The Hub’s full-length interview with U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Cohen can be found here.