Homes in need of retrofitting provide training ground for green construction workers

When Dorine Khainza arrived in Canada from Uganda in January, she didn't know anyone in the country or where to start her new life. What she did know was that she wanted to work with her hands.

"I was determined to do things that I was passionate about. I wasn't just going to sit in an office," Khainza said.

Six months later, the 35-year-old, with her hard hat on and reciprocating saw in hand, worked on removing a window from a semi-detached home in Toronto under the watchful eye of her site supervisor and mentor of the day, Tim Zubek.

"It's actually quite fun," she said smiling, hammering a wedge between the window frame and the wall. "Destroying."

"Destroying things to make them better," Zubek responded. 

The mentor and mentee are part of the Toronto-based social enterprise Building Up. Founded by Marc Soberano in 2014, the contracting non-profit is primarily driven by social causes, and uses the homes it's tasked to retrofit as a training ground for its apprentices — with a focus on green building.

"Where most people train and employ people to run their business, we run our business to train and employ people," Soberano said.

It's one example of some of the work social contractors are doing all across Canada —  "multi-solving" in the face of an affordable housing crisis, a labour shortage in the construction industry and climate change.

Targeted to those who often face barriers to employment, such as racialized people, women, those coming out of incarceration, or newcomers, like Khainza, Building Up's 16-week paid training program offers participants an opportunity to become skilled in green retrofitting to eventually gain long-term employment.

That includes a focus on trades like carpentry and drywalling, water retrofits, enhancing a building's insulation and more.

"There's a labour shortage all around the construction sector today," Soberano said. "But as the construction sector continues to evolve, that shortage is going to be more extreme when it comes to green building and energy efficiency. So this home is a great way to help kind of train the next generation of tradespeople with those skills."

Over the next decade, Ontario's government wants to build 1.5 million homes but said it will need 100,000 more workers to do so. The construction industry employs around 600,000 workers in the province, but with the sector's job vacancy rate at 4.6 per cent, there are still hundreds of skilled construction jobs, with no one to fill them.

That's just looking at construction as a whole. A 2022 report by Canada Green Building Council and the Delphi Group forecasts that the country will see a shortage of workers skilled in green construction over the next few decades, as the demand for clean jobs increases. 

"The challenges that we face as a society are also opportunities," Soberano said.