Sarnia center gets $364K from province to train Southwestern Ontario millwrights

Ontario’s labor minister had good news Thursday for apprentice Katrina Wynne and her colleagues at the Millwright Local 1592 training center in Sarnia.

Monte McNaughton was there to announce $364,000 in funding for millwright training in Southwestern Ontario.

The funding will help 100 journeypersons and apprentices upgrade their skills with training and certification on boom lifts, forklifts, telehandlers and scissor lifts, and helping with employment support, the government said.

“One of the things I’m most proud of is that there has been a nearly 30 per cent increase in female apprenticeship registrations,” said McNaughton, minister of labour, immigration, training and skills development.

“Women are actually leading the skilled trades momentum that we’re seeing in the province,” he said.

Wynne, 21, a year two apprentice, is one of about 20 female members of Local 1592.

Wynne said she has always liked working with her hands and took shop classes at Northern Collegiate in Sarnia.

“When I got out of high school, I realized this was a great fit,” she said of the millwright trade, which installs and maintains industrial equipment.

Wynne, who was in sales before becoming an apprentice, said she was nervous in the beginning. “I didn’t know whether I’d be able to keep up with the physical demands.”

But she saw it as “a great opportunity to learn new skills” and the training she received at Local 1592 helped her get started and gain confidence, she said.

“The mentors and millwrights I work with every day have really been supportive,” she said.

Local 1592 has 600 active members and 166 apprentices, said business representative Patrick Orix. “In a couple of months, we’ll probably add another 30 or 40.”

“The millwright trade is really important in the province,” McNaughton said. “It’s actually the fifth most popular trade when it comes to apprenticeship registrations over the last 12 months.”

There will be millwrights working at the Volkswagen electric vehicle battery plant coming to St. Thomas, as well as at industries in Sarnia, he said.

McNaughton, MPP for Lambton-Kent-Middlesex, has made boosting participation in the skilled trades a signature issue as labor minister.

“In the last 12 months in Ontario, we’ve had 27,319 new apprentices signed up,” he said. “About 2,000 of those are in the millwright trade.”

But Ontario remains short of skilled tradespeople, he said.

“We’re really pushing a message that not every young person has to go to university to be successful in life,” he said. “Careers in the trades offer a pension, benefits and six-figure salaries, like the millwright trade.”

Local 1592, one of Ontario’s eight millwright locals, serves Lambton, Middlesex, Oxford, Huron, Perth and Bruce counties.

The funding announced Thursday is from Ontario’s Skills Development Fund which has supported 596 projects provincewide, the ministry said.

Using the funding to improve training “helps us to recruit more young people across Ontario and across the country,” said Chris Sutton, political affairs directors for the millwright regional council of Canada.

Ontario is short about 72,000 skilled workers, McNaughton said, so while “there’s a lot of momentum around the skilled trades,” there’s still work to do.

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