Training closer to home coming soon for electrical workers

Saskatchewan’s International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union (IBEW) were thrilled with Thursday’s announcement which will expand apprenticeship training in Saskatchewan.

It will soon allow the training to be led by unions and delivered by IBEW as opposed to sending their workers somewhere else to upgrade their skills.

Premier Scott Moe along with IEBW Canada International vice president, Russ Shewchuk, signed a letter of intent to deliver this – as well as a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Ministry of Immigration of Career Training to begin offering construction electrician and power line technician apprenticeship training in 2025.

The MOU will also provide support to offer training for future opportunities in nuclear power generation.

IBEW Local 2067 is located in Regina — Tyler Holmen is the business manager for them. His union mostly works with the power line workers and says this is big for his membership.

“This announcement is absolutely huge for our members and the province of Saskatchewan,” he said.

“Being able to train power line workers ourselves rather than them having to go to a regional college is huge. We can make sure they’re the highest skilled trades and are going out there with the best standard of training.”

Holmen said up until this announcement, those being trained to work on power lines had to go to Weyburn to get their certificates.

Holmen added unions across Saskatchewan have been fighting for this for a while.

“(We’ve been fighting) probably for the life of our local,” he said. “This training used to be provided by SaskPower and then it moved to the southeast college about four years ago and our local has always felt for 50 years that we would’ve been better suited to provide that training and so to have that opportunity now it’s historic for our local.”

Shewchuk and the Premier first met to discuss this plan back in 2022.

“(We) talked about how we can work with each other in the future,” Shewchuck said. “We talked about some of the problems they were having and talked about some of the problems that they were looking to the future, trying to get positions, skilled trades, training started and really seeing a need to invest in the future.

“So, we drew on our experience. We’re heavily involved with the government in Ontario in training and we took some of those applications and said I think they can be transposed and apply in Saskatchewan. We’ve been very, extremely successful in Ontario and in other provinces. So I think we have a real good recipe here for success in the province.”

The announcement from the provincial government comes not long until the province announces the provincial election.

Despite that, Holmen didn’t want to endorse any party unions should vote for.

“I think a lot of that comes down to to the local membership,” he said. “I’m anticipating you’re gonna see, you know, a rural and an urban split in the election. But I think a lot of people understand that. Union members are just your everyday members of the public, right? So they’re no different.

“I have membership across the whole province of Saskatchewan. Literally, the whole province falls within our jurisdiction for power line. So I’m going to have members that vote both ways. That’s the reality. You know, I look after every town, every city, you know, everything that’s made up of Saskatchewan, our members work there, so there will be a divide even within the local.”