The Ontario economy stands to lose at least $40 billion over the next 15 years if it is unable to bring in sufficient numbers of foreign-trained workers to make up for skills shortages, the president of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce says.

Len Crispino says the Ontario chamber has conducted in-depth studies that show the province will have a shortage of at least 100,000 skilled trades workers between now and 2021 in its manufacturing sector alone. Some estimates place the skilled trades shortage at higher than 190,000.

“That kind of shortage has the potential of an enormous cost to our economy,” the president of the provincial chamber says. “The skills shortage is of paramount importance and must be addressed...it’s very critical to us being able to remain a competitive environment.”

In addition to labor shortages in manufacturing, Ontario also has shortages of workers in mining, construction, metal and machining sectors.

Crispino was commenting on an announcement last month by Monte Solberg, federal minister of citizenship and immigration, of plans to expedite entry of temporary foreign workers to Alberta and British Columbia, with no mention of a similar plan for Ontario.

“I think we were disappointed that the recent announcement didn’t include similar provisions for Ontario,” Crispino said. “We’d like to see some aggressive work done in the area of eliminating barriers for internationally-trained skilled workers.”

The 57,000-member Ontario chamber has offered suggestions in continuing discussions with the province on how barriers to integration of foreign-trained skilled workers in Ontario can be eliminated, Crispino says. “We’re hoping we’ll see some results of discussions between Ontario and Ottawa very soon,” he added.

The provincial chamber is also working with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce on a number of related issues of mutual concern, including the skills shortage facing Ontario and the integration of foreign-trained professionals into the province’s work force.

“It’s estimated that the shortage in manufacturing alone to the Ontario economy is over $40 billion in manufacturing output,” Crispino said.

Solberg, along with Diane Finley, federal minister of human resources and social development, announced improvements in the Temporary Workers Program that will enable Alberta and B.C. to hire foreign-trained workers if no Canadian citizens or permanent immigrants are available. The improvements, Solberg said, “are making it easier, faster, and less costly to employers to hire temporary foreign workers.”

The plan will help employers reduce costs and speed up the process of hiring temporary foreign workers by between two and four weeks. It will “effectively help employers having difficulty finding Canadian workers to fill their human resource needs, while continuing to protect the access of Canadian workers to the labor market,” Finley said.

Mike Colle, Ontario’s minister of citizenship and immigration, has said doctors, engineers and academics with foreign credentials can be found to work in Canada, but many skilled trades remain unavailable. He wants Ottawa to grant immigrant status for temporary workers after they’ve been in Canada for two years, conditional on meeting health and security requirements.

Officials in both Solberg’s and Colle’s offices appeared anxious to defuse any suggestion that Ontario was deliberately excluded from the federal initiative. Dialogue is continuing, they said, between the two levels of government on the issue of admitting foreign-trained workers.

“The critics would say that Ontario was left out (of the federal announcement), but that certainly was not the case,” Rick Byun, spokesman for Colle said. Ontario is considered a model for the country in expediting the integration of foreign workers into the workforce in as few as 21 days, Byun said. “It’s an ongoing process and a non-issue.”

But officials of other organizations were also critical of Ontario’s omission from the federal announcement, as well as its failure to deal with the issue of close to 200,000 undocumented workers living in Canada, many of them in the Greater Toronto Area. A group called the Support, Don’t Deport Coalition says within the past year the federal government has doubled the deportation of undocumented workers and their families.

In an earlier statement last month, Solberg announced $307 million in settlement funding to provinces and territories outside Quebec. The funding “will ensure services and supports are in place to give immigrants every opportunity to succeed in their new home,” the announcement said.

“Now there will be more new Canadians who can access language training, orientation, referral to community resources, employment related services, interpretation and translation,” Solberg said.

The funding includes $230 million to Ontario under the Canada-Ontario Immigration Agreement and $77 million for the other provinces and territories, excepting Quebec, which is covered under a separate agreement.

Solberg announced November 1 an immigration target for 2007 of between 240,000 and 265,000, the highest in 25 years. The goal is aimed at meeting Canada’s “extraordinary” labor market needs, he said, adding processing changes will be made to eliminate a backlog of 800,00 applicants and enable more skilled tradespeople to qualify as immigrants.