Brock University

Hamilton Spectator, Dec. 4, 2025

Opinion: Building a brighter future: Why Canada must value trades alongside higher education
To solve the housing crisis, Canadians needs to redefine what we value in education and labour.

Alexandra Macdonald

Imagine a Canada where housing is affordable again.

To get there, we need to build millions of homes — and fast. The federal government has promised to do just that. “Build, baby, build!” was the slogan Prime Minister Mark Carney gave us on election night — along with a commitment to “build homes at a scale and at a speed not seen since the Second World War.” But there’s a catch: we don’t have the workforce to do it. And that shortage reveals something deeper about what we value.

In Hamilton, it is projected that even with new workers entering the labour force between 2024 and 2035, the region will still fall as much as 7,200 workers short of the projected need. Public discussion of the paired housing and labour crises tends to focus on immigration and on education, with increasing attention to the loss of high school trade programs. These are valuable conversations to have, but they miss a bigger question: how did we get here?

As a historian, I see a pattern.

For generations, Canada has placed a premium on jobs that require advanced university degrees, while undervaluing other types of work, knowledge and experience — even as we rely heavily on this knowledge and skill to build the spaces where “great thinkers” live, work and innovate.

The drive to create and support “thinkers,” often at the expense of “doers,” has a long and complicated history.

One story traces this back to the 19th century as part of the Industrial Revolution. As the factory system took over, society increasingly prized “high-skill” white collar jobs while ushering in low paid, “low-skill,” low respect roles, and hollowing out work that once sat somewhere in the middle.

But this artificial divide between “thinking” and “doing” jobs, and elevating one over the other, can be traced even further back. My research tracks how in the 17th and 18th centuries elite white men in Britain sought to devalue embodied knowledge held by women and people of colour. Instead, they worked to create new value systems that elevated types of knowledge that, they argued, was the realm of the mind and not the body.

This process stripped value from deeply significant forms of knowledge — knowledge that was done rather than merely thought. For example, baking, cooking and pickling are all highly sensory processes that require an intimate knowledge of the sights, smells, sounds and textures of the ingredients as they are transformed into food. This knowledge is often deeply specialized and is incredibly hard to learn without hands-on engagement.

However, to legitimize the “work of the mind,” authors devalued hard-won knowledge like that required to process food as nothing more than “folk knowledge” and, in doing so, contributed to the belief that thinking is knowing and not doing and, importantly for where we now find ourselves, that knowing is more valuable than doing.

It is hard to debate the fact that Canada needs to find a solution to the housing crisis, but history suggests we also need to rethink some of our foundational value systems around knowledge. Historians, sociologists and anthropologists increasingly argue that doing is thinking, and the past shows us there is immense value in learning and transferring embodied knowledge.

Most of us will never lay bricks or wire homes ourselves. But we can change how we value the skills that make building possible. If this seems too lofty a goal, think of a time you tried to recreate a meal made by someone who had an intimate knowledge of the sensory nature of food: its smells, tastes, sights, sounds and textures. Even with the recipe in hand, you likely fell short. In that moment you glimpsed the value of embodied knowledge.

The same thing is true for the building sector. You may not know how to do the embodied work of building your home, but you trust it won’t collapse because someone did have that knowledge. Yet we continue to steer young people around us toward university rather than a trades program.

Rethinking our value systems around labour and education will not single-handedly solve the housing crisis. But understanding why we value one type of education and work over another may help Canadians realign our values — and give us a fighting chance to “Build, baby, build.”

Alexandra Macdonald is a postdoctoral fellow at Brock University in the Department of History and a member of the McCall MacBain Postdoctoral Fellows Teaching and Leadership Program at McMaster University.