Could Olivia Chow really force city contractors to hire young people?
THE IDEA
Back in May, Olivia Chow made a proposal that she continues to tout at debates and other publicity stops. Her idea is to use community benefit agreements (or CBAs) to require companies that take on major city infrastructure contracts to hire local youth—a measure Chow says will help create 5,000 new jobs and apprenticeships for young Torontonians over four years. “One out of five young people can’t find a job,” Chow said at a press conference. “It’s demoralizing. They don’t have their first job, they can’t get experience, and then they can’t land a new job. It’s a vicious cycle.”
WOULD IT WORK?
Community benefit agreements, in a general sense, already do. They’ve been used in the U.K., Los Angeles, Vancouver (for the Olympic Village) and even Toronto. As part of the Regent Park revitalization, the city partnered with Toronto Community Housing and the area’s developer, Daniels Corporation, to design a hiring program that created nearly 500 jobs for local residents. “It’s a useful and successful model,” says Steve Shallhorn, executive director of the Labour Education Centre, a nonprofit training organization that advocates for CBAs. “There are lessons learned from Regent Park that could be applied to future community benefit agreements in Toronto.”
Could those future agreements create ten times as many jobs in a much larger area? There are a few possible hitches. For one, Canada’s Agreement on Internal Trade prohibits “discriminatory procurement practices,” such as requiring that “a construction contractor or subcontractor use workers, materials or suppliers of materials originating from the province where the work is being carried out.”
“There may be some trade challenges,” Shallhorn says, “but I think the logic is that, since it’s Toronto taxpayers paying the bills, Toronto citizens would have first crack at the job.” (The Regent Park agreement didn’t face legal issues on this point.) Additionally, he says, applicants or new workers would almost inevitably need to live in or around the city, whether the agreement stipulated that or not. With a properly framed recruitment process, he says, “I don’t see any legal impediments.”
Because of existing recruitment and training tools, the plan wouldn’t cost the city any significant amount of money, Shallhorn adds. “That infrastructure is already in place, so presumably that’s how the recruitment would be done.” Chow’s agreements, he thinks, would simply change the ages of the people entering training. “There might be a bit of extra money spent on the actual apprentice training programs, but that would be a provincial cost.”
If the community benefit agreement is financially and legally feasible, then, could it really create 5,000 new jobs and apprenticeships over four years? “It’s probably realistic, given the size of the city’s construction budget,” Shallhorn says. While Chow’s plan obviously doesn’t guarantee every one of the unemployed youth she mentions will be willing to work in the sector, the agreement in itself, Shallhorn concludes, “is entirely doable.”
How do other 2014 mayoral candidates’ ideas measure up? Click here to find out.
How about you just give City contracts to the lowest and best bidders. Isn’t there enough padding and crony capitalist/union bloat considerations in these contracts? Did her and her late husband’s “brilliance” not cause taxpayers to end up paying hundreds of millions of dollars more than necessary for subway cars?
Olivia Chow makes me proud to be a Canadian!Her visionary,bold and innovative leadership is exactly what our beloved Toronto and All of her beautiful residence deserve!
Notably this would be providing both
80% of Torontonians don’t think so.
The lowest are not necessarily the best. I’ve seen bidders lob all bids so that they can be competitive. once they win the contract, they find it hard to deliver.
Young people can’t find jobs because most sit on their asses thinking about how these jobs are owed to them somehow. At 28, I do fall into that age category, so I’m holding my peers accountable on this one. The only way I got a job ever is by yes, dreaming and believing I deserved one but by also by taking that first step and putting myself out there. A nearly-global society inflicted by sheer apathy can’t be “fixed” by a some mama bear who thinks we owe it to the youth of today because boo-boo, “they can’t find jobs.” It’s simply dangerous. It perpetuates the idea of entitlement and it’s unfair to the older generations who HAVE been working for several more decades than this army of lazy sprites. My first real job was Dairy Queen, 14 years old. And although I’ve taken breaks when I felt I needed to, I basically haven’t stopped working since.
Hey kids, if there really are no jobs for you, make your own! Develop ideas, look for work that not only uses your “degrees” but that emphasizes the essence of you as a person of this society, work to be the best at whatever it is you’re good at. And in the meantime as you build, work at a coffee shop. Prosperity will come if you’re working toward using your gifts to benefit your society while fulfilling your dreams. To have a job is not a right. It’s a privilege, and one that should be respected.