Executive Summary
There is an increasing need to grow and diversify the skilled trades workforce to meet labour demand in the face of a surge in retirements among aging building trades workers. Yet there is an unseen barrier standing in the way, child care access, which represents a critical but under-addressed challenge for those seeking to build and sustain careers in the skilled trades. Addressing child care access for tradespeople can enable more people with a drive to undertake this challenging and rewarding work to enter and stay in the industry.
The LiUNA Local 506 Training Centre Construction and Child Care Research Initiative, supported by the Ontario Skills Development Fund, has focused on providing insights and solutions to this vital workforce challenge. As part of this initiative, this report has been developed to identify challenges and help build solutions to enable tradespeople to access child care and better support their ability to participate in and succeed in the trades.
There are a number of factors which cumulatively make skilled trades work in construction distinct, and which can make accessing child care more of a challenge. These include:
- Early start times
- Overtime
- Start and end times, which can be unpredictable
- Regularly changing worksites with differing amounts of time needed to get to work
- Time-limited projects for multiple contractors
- Unexpected last-minute changes, including due to weather
- Periods off work in-between jobs
Together these factors can make it hard for parents in the skilled trades – both men and women – to access licensed child care that is generally designed around a typical 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. workday
At the same time, Canada is now engaged in a historic process of implementing a publicly funded Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care System (CWELCC) that can serve as a key support for building up Canadian prosperity in the years and decades ahead. Progress is already evident, with labour force participation for women up 1.4 percentage points since 2019 and positive impacts on Canada’s GDP growth and proportion of women working fulltime.
In 2025, CWELCC was renewed with the signing of new federal child care agreements by most provinces, extending funding to 2031. Continued progress on implementing CWELCC across all levels of government and through political cycles is critical to achieving the vision of accessible and affordable quality child care for all parents, including those with distinct needs like parents in the building trades.
Nonetheless, more needs to be done to address the needs of all parents. In particular, how CWELCC supports skilled tradespeople and other parents who work outside “standard hours” needs to improve, with all levels of government working together on implementation of commitments to meet their needs. There are also opportunities for the construction industry – including unions and employers – to play a role alongside government to help address child care barriers for the building trades workforce.
Creating new models and addressing these challenges will have wide-ranging positive effects – not only for the construction sector and building trades – but for other critical workforces who have similar needs and non-standard schedules as well.
A range of potential approaches to address these challenges emerged as part of research and engagement conducted through this initiative, including:
- Extending hours at existing child care centres
- Aligning licensed home-based care to skilled tradespeople’s needs and potentially recruiting providers from among building trades families
- Developing new on-site child care centres at mega-project sites
- Founding union-owned child care provider organizations
- Leveraging union properties to provide new location options
There is no one right direction, and, ultimately, a range of pathways will be required to meet the needs of skilled tradespeople, who themselves have diverse needs, depending on their trades, schedules, work patterns and family situations.
The 20 recommendations in this report, targeted to specific stakeholders and partners, are designed to help identify the options that will meet the needs of skilled tradespeople in different places and situations and to help make the vision of change a reality. Each recommendation is further elaborated in this report.