Canada is at a skills-training inflection point. Improved training outcomes and a more skilled workforce are essential to the success of Canada’s sweeping policy reset, especially given the shock of tariffs and other adverse U.S. economic policies, the structural disruption of artificial intelligence and longstanding weaknesses in productivity.
Yet, despite billions of dollars in public investment in training programs, across the economy weaknesses in workforce skills and shortages in key sectors are a drag on Canadian growth.
Nowhere is this more consequential than in the construction sector. Construction is a cornerstone of Canada’s fundamental policy shift, yet the industry faces major training issues. The capability to build Canada depends upon its ability to find, train and retain skilled workers.
Our paper examines that training challenge. It focuses on Ontario’s construction industry, where the problems are not a lack of training opportunities but inadequate engagement, uptake and completion rates. We use a behavioural science lens to assess Ontario’s issues in construction-skills training.
Why Canada’s nation-building moment demands a skills revolution
A behavioural approach incorporates the cognitive, social and structural forces that shape how people actually decide and act. Its lens offers practical insights into how people’s training choices are shaped by limited time, attention and information. It helps explain barriers such as why strong intentions to enrol or persist in training often do not translate into action.
Adopting a behavioural lens in training policy means designing the system around how people notice, think and act. It is essential to address the range of training issues from the need to attract more new entrants and reduce apprenticeship dropouts to helping sustain careers in the trades.
Demand for skilled trades is growing
Workforce-skills shortages are estimated to have caused Canada’s gross domestic product to be $2.6 billion lower in 2024 alone. They account for seven per cent of the large and growing Canada-U.S. labour-productivity gap since 2014.
In construction, even with the weaker housing demand in the mid 2020s, shortages of workers remain significant in a range of skilled trades. Rising demand for non-residential construction together with the ongoing wave of worker retirements creates large-scale excess demand for skilled construction tradespeople estimated by one study at an additional 410,000 to 520,000 workers by 2030, and by the federal government at more than 1.4 million more by 2033.
While a range of occupations are at risk from AI’s adoption, skilled trades are expected to be net beneficiaries in the near-to-medium term, from digital construction applications and significant demand boosts from data centres, energy and power projects.
Opportunities in construction work bear emphasis given the job losses from higher U.S. tariffs since January 2025. The employment repercussions for major Canadian industries (i.e. aluminum, autos, lumber and steel) and future risks with the volatile U.S. approach to trade and other economic policies continuing through at least mid 2026.
In contrast, Ottawa’s wide-ranging policy reset that started in spring 2025 will substantially increase demand for workers, particularly skilled trades, given huge investments and other federal measures to boost defence, energy, housing, infrastructure and trade diversification.
Why skilled-trades training falls short
Ontario accounts for roughly 38 per cent of Canada’s construction market and its GDP, according to 2025 data. Ontario’s construction industry is composed of residential and non-residential sectors, with non-residential further divided into sectors including industrial, commercial and institutional, and electrical power.
Construction-skills training occurs through a fragmented ecosystem involving the federal, Ontario and municipal governments, hundreds of institutions and a diverse range of private-sector actors. Most apprenticeship learning takes place on the job. But a meaningful share occurs in classrooms and dedicated training facilities, provided by approved entities that include colleges of applied arts and technology and union- or employer-sponsored training centres.
Young people and adults selecting a construction career in Ontario face choice overload in navigating an education admissions system with hundreds of entry points while trying to select a single choice from the 144 skilled construction trades that existed (as of July 2026). This choice overload is compounded by the difference between certified and non-certified trades and the variety of careers within each trade.
Other key barriers to choosing and entering a trade include overcoming the longstanding bias of many schools and guidance counsellors in favouring academic paths over construction work.
Peopleengaging in and completing trainingface uncertainty and loss aversion about the net benefits in accepting the tangible upfront costs of training in exchange for future income gains that are delayed and not guaranteed. The prospect of wasted time and money can loom larger than the long-term gains even when the odds clearly favour training. The risks of downturns in demand for skilled trades also increases uncertainty about upfront costs versus future income.
Additional barriers to completion include small frictions such as administrative burdens, inconsistent feedback and unclear expectations, which can substantially reduce persistence. Completion rates are also much higher in the certified trades because the credential has unambiguous value. In contrast, the incentive to finish training in the non-certified trades erodes substantially – as do actual completions – as wages approach journeyperson levels without it.
Sustaining a construction careerremains a major retention concern. Twenty-two per cent of the construction workforce is projected to retire by 2032, removing decades of accumulated knowledge that cannot easily be taught in a classroom, It is a knowledge-transfer challenge the training pipeline was not designed to absorb.
Designing training around human behaviour
Addressing the structural issues in Ontario’s training system requires redesigning its system around human behaviour. We recommend three pillars in a new approach.
The first pillaris a behaviourally informed training system. It begins with re-assessing the path for young adults entering and those making mid-career shifts into the trades. It involves co-ordinating employers, colleges, unions and governments around fundamental change, starting with primary school for learning about skilled trades. Drawing upon applicable aspects of best practices elsewhere, such as the successful systems of Austria, Germany and Switzerland, can also help improve the design and implementation of training.
Next is embedding behavioural insights into training’s design and delivery. This means designing classroom and on-the-job programs based upon how people actually behave. Vital changes include improving the choice architecture for new entrants and trainees to reduce friction at the specific points where people disengage from training to make the path easier.
Testing is the third pillar. Testing through experimentation is a crucial discipline. It means building evaluation into programs at the start rather than retrofitting it. Testing would address the lack of knowledge in the training system about which programs work well, which need improvement and which should be discontinued.
Conclusion
Canada’s sweeping policy reset and economic success depend upon better skills training. No sector is more important than construction in meeting these challenges to build Canada.
Already Alberta and the Halifax region are facing significant constraints from an inadequate supply of skilled tradespeople and substantial shortages are forecast for Canada.
Improving Canada’s training system requires far more than the traditional approach of increased awareness initiatives, subsidies and tax incentives. Success means designing training for human behaviour.
Until training policies are designed around human behaviour, the problems of the skilled-worker shortage in construction and other key sectors will continue to escalate.
