Ottawa provides $2.5M to fund 40 female trade apprentices

As many as 40 Nova Scotian women who want to learn a trade may get the chance thanks to a new federal projectaimed at attractingmore women into the trades, particularly women who are black, Indigenous or are newcomers to Canada.

The $2.5 millionAdvancing Women in Apprenticeship project provides a 70 per cent wage subsidy for two years, along with money for training and tools.

Plumbing apprentice Lisa Tufts thinks the program is a good idea.

"It's going to help a lot of womenand maybe encourage more women to get into the trades," she said from the third floor of her current worksite, the Pavilion at South Park in downtown Halifax.

Tufts, a mother of two boys who aresevenand five,saidworking as a plumber has given her a chance to earn more than the minimum-wage jobs she had until she learned a trade.

She saidthe job allows her to earn a good living and teach her sons,Keeyan and Kyler, an important life lesson.

"They can do whatever they want to do in life," she said.

Her boss, Barry McGillivray, the president of Centurion Mechanical East Coast, is happy to have Tuftson the payroll.

'They tend to have a lot of drive'

Although she's the only female construction worker on his 30-person workforce, McGillivraysaidshe's not the first woman tradesperson his company has hired or apprenticed.

"They tend to have a lot of drive and strive to stay on an equal footing, prove that they're capable of being on an equal footing with their male counterparts and generally they're more than capable of doing that," he said.

McGillivraysaid women also tend to be better problem-solvers and think through, rather than forge ahead, when encountering a problem or tricky task.

He would like to see more women on construction sites.

"It's about time that we started to break the barriers down a little bit more than we already have," he said.

Marjorie Davison, CEO of theNova Scotia Apprenticeship Agency, shewould like to see more company owners like McGillivray.

"We need employers and union organizations to step up," she said. "They need to show the leadership."

According to a federal government news release, women only represented five per cent of the workforce in Red Seal trades in 2017. It said women were concentrated in the three lowest-paying trades: bakers, cooks and hairstylists.