Community News

LABOUR SHORTAGE DISCUSSED BY ELECTION CANDIDATES

SOUTHERN GEORGIAN BAY CHAMBER OF COMMERCE HOSTS VIRTUAL FORUM

FRANK MATYS fmatys@simcoe.com

Provincial election candidates vying to represent Simcoe North weighed in on a handful of issues during a virtual all-candidates forum hosted by the Southern Georgian Bay Chamber of Commerce.

Present were Jill Dunlop (Progressive Conservative), Aaron Cayden Hiltz (Liberal), Elizabeth Van Houtte (NDP), Erik Schomann (Green Party, standing in for Krystal Brooks), and Aaron MacDonald (Ontario Party).

Here's some of what they had to say about addressing Ontario's labour shortage:

JILL DUNLOP: "Today, Ontario is facing the largest labour shortage in a generation of over 300,000 jobs going unfilled. This is why Doug Ford and the Ontario PCs are working for workers by launching Better Jobs Ontario ... a new program that is for anyone looking for training for indemand work by paying up to $28,000 for short-duration, job-specific training." AARON CAYDEN HILTZ: "If we want to encourage people to work ... we have to start paying them fairly. So, servers, retail workers, nurses, PSWs, they were all screwed during the pandemic. The fact is that they are not going to come back to these sectors as long as the Conservative government keeps their wages low."

ERIK SCHOMANN: "A model that I think might be workable (for skilled trades) is to actually restructure the educational and pedagogical feature so that it mimics something more similar to the German apprenticeship model. What would be the benefit of that is that we would be able to get students, while they're

studying, to be able to be employed at the exact same time."

ELIZABETH VAN HOUTTE: "If we increase minimum wage, it would give people an up; that's what we are proposing. Healthy workers lead to a healthy economy — if we have a fullyfunded health-care system, education system, a plan for skilled trades, an ongoing plan with legislation to support people, then we wouldn't have a labour shortage."

AARON MACDONALD: "Specifically with the Ontario Party, we would immediately end all the remaining restrictions and push to have people who have lost jobs that they loved, over personal choice, back to work. It's very important that we have people, we have skilled people today that can't work because of (pandemic) restrictions that are in place."

PROVINCIAL ELECTION

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2022-05-19T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-19T07:00:00.0000000Z

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