Will gender inequities in labour market investment undermine nation-building projects?
Canada's federal government has pledged $6 billion to recruit up to 100,000 new skilled trades workers by 2030 — but critics say the flagship Team Canada Strong program is built around a workforce that already exists, leaving half the population without investment in their labour.
Announced on April 29, 2026, as part of the Spring Economic Update, the initiative offers wage subsidies, apprenticeship completion bonuses of $5,000, and a $400 weekly top-up during in-class technical training. It is, by design, a sweeping nation-building investment. It's also, by default, overwhelmingly aimed at young men. According to Statistics Canada, women currently make up just 7.3 per cent of the skilled trades workforce in Canada — a figure that decades of recruitment campaigns have failed to shift — and the new funding program seems to contain no structural provision addressing that.
“This is good policy in a lot of ways in the sense that young men need support,” says Ilona Dougherty, managing director of the Youth & Innovation Project at the University of Waterloo. “But this isn’t a policy that's going to actually get more women into the trades — the reason women aren't in the trades isn't about a lack of training programs, a lack of wage subsidies, or any of those kinds of things, it's much more structural than that.”
Alongside the $6 billion announcement sits the federal Women in the Skilled Trades Initiative: $43.5 million over four years. The math is stark. For every dollar directed at women's trades participation, approximately $138 goes into the general pool that mostly excludes them.
A gendered definition of economic investment
For Kendra Strauss, a professor and labour researcher at Simon Fraser University, the funding gap reflects something deeper than a policy oversight. It reflects how governments categorize what counts as economic investment, she says.
“There seems to be this belief or this kind of ideology underpinning this, that investments in public services, for example like healthcare, are a cost, whereas investments in the trades workforce or these private energy infrastructures, are an investment,” says Strauss. “From an HR and a people perspective, that's a bit of a jarring contradiction, because certainly investing in the skills of a nurse is just as valuable, both in the context of having a well-trained and stable labour force, and also obviously from the perspective of what our society needs.”
That framing has real workforce consequences. Statistics Canada figures show that health care and social assistance added approximately 119,000 jobs in the 12 months to April 2026 — sectors staffed predominantly by women. Without that growth, every other sector in the Canadian economy would have contracted, but those industries receive nothing comparable to Team Canada Strong funding, says Strauss.
The International Monetary Fund estimated in 2017 that closing Canada's gender participation gap could add approximately four per cent to GDP — nearly $130 billion at Canada’s 2025 GDP figures. However, it hasn’t translated into commensurate action.
“I think it's safe to say that we've seen something of a rollback of commitments to gender equity under [Prime Minister Mark] Carney compared to [previous Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau — the previous administration did put more resources into aspects of a gender equity policy, but it takes really sustained commitment and investment,” says Strauss. “It's not a priority, unfortunately, and I think policymakers are quite comfortable with a gender division of labour.”
Entry programs miss the real barriers
According to Dougherty, the biggest structural barrier for women in the trades is childcare. Affordable, accessible childcare is the single most important lever for women's labour mobility — including in the trades, she says. “Can you be on a job site at 6 a.m. — which is often required in the trades — if you don't have childcare that starts at 6 a.m., or if there's an expectation that you're going to stay late at work when you have to pick your kid up by five?” she says. "It's all of those structural pieces that really need to be dealt with if we're going to move the needle at all.”
She notes that childcare commitments under the federal Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care program are falling well below targets set for 2026, and to address this there needs to be more trained early-childhood educators and locations for them to work.
For HR leaders tracking Canada's labour market outlook for 2026, this matters. The trades aren’t the only sector in urgent need of workers. The care sector — childcare, healthcare, and social services — is where much of the actual job growth is happening. Underfunding those occupations, and the infrastructure that enables women to work in them or transition out of them, is a people strategy with compounding costs, says Dougherty.
What HR can do until policy catches up
Both Strauss and Dougherty agree that there are steps that HR and talent leaders can take today to open the door to the underused female labour market, without a grant or a new initiative.
Strauss emphasizes the importance of skilled HR professionals in creating cultures where equity policies are lived experience rather than documentation. She says there’s a persistent tension between worksite culture and the policies written in offices — and the need to bridge that gap with mentorship structures that are meaningful and accessible.
“Part of the issue is there can be a separation between the worksite and what happens there, and the office,” says Strauss. “Making a woman employee feel confident that her voice will be heard if she raises a concern, that it will be taken seriously, that she has somebody she can go to — and if that person is also somebody in a mentoring or supervisory capacity, then that can make all the difference.”
Dougherty suggests HR leaders start with something simpler: listening. “The practical first step is to really hear what's going on in a woman's life and think about what structural barriers in somebody's unique employment situation could be addressed,” she says. “Listening and saying, ‘Okay, what can we do to make work more flexible’ — that's going to lead to retention. Valuing employees, investing in employees — we all know that leads to retention.”
While many organizations are navigating economic pressures, Dougherty disagrees with the instinct to defer flexibility investments when times are hard. “You end up just spinning your wheels and not retaining employees — which is even more costly, I would argue, than training and flexibility,” she says.
The broader picture
For organizations with trades components or significant female workforces in care, health, and education sectors, Team Canada Strong raises a strategic question beyond its direct funding provisions: are workforce policies being designed around the full picture of who Canada's workers are, and what they need to participate fully?
Provinces have begun to move independently. Two provinces announced new funding to support women in skilled trades in August 2025, and the Canadian Association of Women in Construction has set a 2035 target of 35 per cent female representation across the industry.
HR leaders in sectors across Canada — whether they work in construction, healthcare, or any industry navigating talent shortages — are ultimately operating inside the same policy framework. Federal funding announcements for women in trades have historically been relatively modest, and the gap between intent and investment has remained wide. Understanding that gap — and not waiting for it to close — may be a consequential HR decision for leaders make in the years ahead.
“We need this government to get that the social infrastructure that keeps our communities strong is a fundamental piece of the picture,” says Dougherty. “If you have young people or women without affordable childcare, you're going to have women who can't change industries because they feel like they're stuck and that they can't take risks.”
Social infrastructure underlies nation-building projects
Women's workforce participation has risen globally over the past decade, but the pace in Canada's most gender-segregated industries tells a different story — one that $6 billion in trades investment, absent a parallel commitment to social infrastructure, is unlikely to change, according to Dougherty.
“I think this government is very strategic in a lot of ways when it comes to geopolitics, and bold when it comes to nation-building projects,” she says. “But it seems to be a bit myopic about not recognizing the social infrastructure that underlies a lot of our ability to deliver on these big things.”
Strauss believes that there may be a genuine desire by policymakers to see more women in these professions, but so far they’re only offering “band-aid solutions.”
“It’s something of an afterthought,” says Strauss. “There are far fewer resources that go into that particular dimension than go into investing in these sectors overall.”
