Monday, October 27, 2025

Supporting Ontario’s Skills Development Fund: Building Careers, Strengthening Communities

CLAC calls for continued support of Ontario’s Skills Development Fund

RE: Support for Ontario’s Skills Development Fund

Dear Minister Piccini,

We are writing to express strong continued support for Ontario’s Skills Development Fund (SDF). We appreciate the SDF’s role in enabling sustainable, high-impact training that helps current and future skilled tradespeople grow their career possibilities. While every program can evolve and improve, we believe the SDF is working and should continue, and we will be including it in our pre-budget requests for 2026.

With SDF support, we’ve partnered with employers, workers, and local organizations to develop and deliver CLAC’s Construction Bootcamp, our Supervisor Micro-certification Program, and a Group Sponsor Program (GSP) for apprentices. Collectively, these initiatives are supporting thousands of entry-level workers, current workers, and high school students on their paths to fulfilling careers in the skilled trades. Built to be scalable and self-sustaining, these programs will continue serving our members and the broader communities we serve well into the future.

We also want to highlight how the SDF is bringing together key stakeholders—employers, unions, training delivery agents, and community partners—to collaborate on innovative programs that reach wider audiences. A clear example is CLAC’s Group Sponsorship Program, which now supports over 1,500 registered apprentices employed at 125 small- and medium-sized construction employers across nine trades. The GSP reduces administrative burden for employers and apprentices, supports recruitment, transitions between employers, mentorship, and completion, and is overseen by a joint employer/union advisory board—an ecosystem approach the SDF helped catalyze. These are exactly the kinds of collaborative, scalable outcomes the province should value in evaluating the SDF’s success.

As with any public investment, rigorous oversight matters. We can attest that ministry staff monitored our SDF-funded outcomes thoroughly, and we were pleased to receive positive feedback for meeting or exceeding our agreed-upon targets. We understand our proposals were approved because they aligned with labour-force needs, reflected CLAC’s training track record, and demonstrated organizational capacity.

Looking ahead, we encourage an evolution of the SDF that sustains what’s working and measures what matters:

Maintain a strong focus on collaboration and ecosystem-building—programs that leverage multiple partners to widen reach, improve completion, and accelerate time-to-skill.
Tighten alignment to labour-market needs while recognizing multi-year efforts, especially those that support apprentices on their pathways.
Continue assessing outcomes beyond short-term training volumes—e.g., employer uptake, apprentice progression and completion, portability of supports across employers, and the ability to serve small and medium-sized firms at scale.

Thank you for your leadership in investing to advance Ontario’s skilled trades. We hope to see these investments continue in Budget 2026 and welcome the opportunity to showcase SDF-enabled programming and to introduce you to apprentices, graduates, and employer and community partners who are benefiting from this work.

Supporting Ontario’s Skills Development Fund: Building Careers, Strengthening Communities

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