EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
Most of the training facilities that the Ford government has announced plans to subsidize and give special building approvals to will benefit labour groups that endorsed the Progressive Conservatives ahead of this year’s provincial election.
As of early this year, there were 41 projects that Premier Doug Ford’s government had signed agreements to grant funding to through the Skills Development Fund (SDF) Capital Stream, according to its 2025 budget. The funding program is the newer of the two branches of the SDF, which the Ford government has used to provide tax dollars to training initiatives since partway into its first mandate.
Through the SDF Capital Stream, the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development provides funding for “major capital investments to build new training centres (or to) upgrade existing training centres,” a government website says.
The Ford government intends to lend another helping hand to the grant recipients with Bill 30. If the legislation is passed, it would exempt SDF Capital Stream-funded facilities from laws that development projects typically have to follow.
“The government of Ontario intends to exempt training centres funded through our Skills Development Fund Capital Stream from processes and approvals under the Planning Act, Heritage Act, Conservation Authorities Act, Municipal Act and the City of Toronto Act,” Labour Minister David Piccini announced on May 26. “We want to ensure that bricks and mortar infrastructure is there to support workers as they take the next steps in preparing for good-paying jobs, and unleashing Ontario’s economy.”
Piccini tabled Bill 30, titled the Working for Workers Seven Act, a couple of days later, a week before the legislature wrapped up its spring sitting. MPPs are scheduled to resume sitting on Oct. 20. As one of the Ford government’s leftover bills from the spring, Bill 30 could be one of the pieces of legislation it looks to pass before the end of the year.
The government has not released a full list of SDF Capital Stream-funded projects. In announcements held over the last couple of years, it has revealed at least 23. Of these projects, 19 are being built to train workers whose unions, or labour associations, publicly endorsed the PC party in the lead-up to this year’s Ontario election.
Before this story was published, a spokesperson for the labour minister hadn’t responded to questions The Trillium had asked him in an email about the SDF Capital Stream, its recipients and Bill 30.
The Labourers' International Union of North America (LiUNA) and the Carpenters’ Regional Council (CRC) are two of the top beneficiaries of the SDF Capital Stream, and each publicly endorsed the PC party ahead of February’s election.
The Ford government has promised about $13 million in funding to expand and upgrade five CRC training centres in Windsor, Cambridge, London, Sudbury and Ottawa.
LiUNA is also building multiple new training centres supported by over $32 million in SDF Capital Stream grants.
Five of the grants the government has announced, totalling about $9 million, are going to municipalities — Georgina, Orangeville, Newmarket, Clarington and Hanover — for new firefighting training facilities.
The Ontario Professional Fire Fighters Association (OPFFA) also endorsed the PCs ahead of this year’s election.
Attempts to reach spokespeople for LiUNA, the CRC and OPFFA on Monday went unanswered before this story’s publication.
Other labour groups that endorsed the PC party and have local affiliates that have been promised SDF Capital Stream funding to help build or upgrade training facilities include the Ontario Sheet Metal Workers & Roofers Conference, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Millwright Regional Council and the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers.
The business manager for another, Mike Gallagher of IUOE Local 793, which represents thousands of crane operators in the province, said in a phone interview on Monday that the $5 million of SDF Capital Stream funding his union is receiving will cover a sliver of what the crane-operating training facility it’s building near Barrie will cost.
“Receiving funding for us is normal because we’re one of the most expensive trades because of the cost of the tools (and) the equipment … cranes and heavy equipment (are) very expensive,” Gallagher said. “We’ve been receiving funding from every brand of government … whether it be NDP, Liberal or Conservative, and at both levels of government, provincial and federal. But despite the funding we receive, we mostly pay for it ourselves (from) our members’ contributions that come into the training trust fund from every hour that they work.”
Gallagher said IUOE Local 793’s new training facility is expected to be completed near the end of next year. It’s costing about $35 million in total, including the cost to purchase the land. Bill 30 likely wouldn’t have a significant impact on its development, which has been underway since last year.
“We did everything by the book that we needed to do,” Gallagher said.
The Skills Development Fund has become one of Ford’s PCs’ favourite programs. The premier and the labour minister attended multiple media events together this summer to unveil some of the latest grants the provincial government is giving out through the program.
Including the SDF’s training and capital funding streams, the Ford government has given grants to hundreds of organizations over the last five years. It’ll have distributed about $2.5 billion through the program for training initiatives and projects at the end of its latest round of funding.
The program also recently became a source of contention between some of Ontario’s most prominent labour organizations.
With college support workers that it represents on the verge of a strike last week, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) published what it described as a “bombshell report” about the SDF. It argued that the Ford government has tried to “systematically defund Ontario colleges, while committing $2.5 billion in public dollars to … (the) ‘Skills Development Fund,’ a provincial funding envelope designed to cultivate non-college training programs.”
The Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL), which OPSEU is a part of, has been supporting the union, whose college support worker members started their strike midway through last week.
On Friday, LiUNA announced it was leaving the OFL over other groups’ criticisms of the SDF.
—With files from Sneh Duggal and Katherine DeClerq