THUNDER BAY – The new $19-million building on Confederation College is on target to be finished during the coming months and to be ready for the start of the next school year.
Construction on the Technology, Education and Collaboration (TEC) Hub, which is connected to the McIntyre Building near the William Street entrance to the campus, has progressed throughout the year to the point where it is now fully enclosed.
Confederation College president Jim Madder said the 45,000-square-foot space will allow the school to enhance its industry skills and sustainability instruction, advanced manufacturing technology and innovation and incubation.
“Everything from working with our First Nations partners of doing introductory levels of skills that could lead to trades in a whole variety of fields, we just don’t have the space and the type of equipment to have that occur,” Madder said on Friday at a news conference announcing the building’s construction status.
“Larger manufacturing, greater diversity in the types of manufacturing programs that we have being able to serve our regional manufacturers. A lot of our work with teaching manufacturing students is to do projects for industry and to do projects with industry. Prototyping for industry itself, doing those initial productions of them just to make sure their ideas will work as well.”
The new building will house the college’s existing engineering technology programs and allow for the relocation of the aerospace manufacturing program. There will also be space for skilled trades programming, with a particular focus on Indigenous students.
Those programs are in demand not only by students but by prospective employers, Madder said.
“The number of people coming out of all of our technology (programs) are very well employed very, very quickly,” Madder said, adding the new building is designed in a way that it can be adapted and reconfigured in the future.
Funding for the project was first announced in the 2016 provincial budget, with Ontario putting forward a total of $9 million.
Thunder Bay-Atikokan MPP Bill Mauro said the creation of the TEC Hub will have regional implications.
“We have a shortage of people in those particular areas so the capacity of the college to train more people in some of those areas will be good for the labour force in Northwestern Ontario,” Mauro said.
The provincial dollars were subsequently matched by Ottawa and federal Employment Minister Patty Hajdu said enhancing skills training will prepare workers to enter a constantly evolving economy.
“We’ve all heard about the rapid change in technology and how it’s driving an analysis really across many countries about what kinds of skillsets we need. With a TEC Hub like this and a focus on innovation, I think we’re well poised to make sure we can adapt as a region as our economies adapt,” Hajdu said.
The emphasis on skilled trades is particularly important when there are as many as 120,000 such jobs unfilled across Canada, which particularly affects the mining and forestry sectors in Northwestern Ontario, she added.
“What we need to do is talk about how, first of all, critical those professionals are to our economy and how well-paying those jobs are. These are good, decent jobs,” Hajdu said.
