Financing Roofing Education
By Don B. Marks, Executive Director, OIRCA

Elsewhere in this issue of the Roofing News you will read about our partnership with Conestoga College to build a roofing skills training centre at their Waterloo Campus.  While this is wonderful news and a long time in the making, it’s success and the future of industry training elsewhere in the province is not cast in stone. 

Training, in fact education in any form is an expensive undertaking.  Just look at how much of our tax dollars goes towards our school system.  The Conestoga College facility, when up and running, will service a large sector of the province, but it will have little impact in the east or the north and there is no guarantee that it will be able to meet the demands of Toronto’s large roofing industry.

I do not want to minimize the impact that a Waterloo based training centre will have on Ontario’s roofing industry but it will have its limitations.  That being said, the Conestoga model could become a template for the development of additional training centres in other parts of the province that can show a demand for regional training.

While these additional facilities may be developed on a slightly different scale, there is no reason that these other areas of the province cannot enjoy their own training facilities.  The only question of course is how do we pay for these schools.  Hopefully there will always be some sort of government assistance available.  Nevertheless additional funding from industry will be necessary just as it is with Conestoga.

We cannot though, go hat in hand to industry every time we wish to open a roofing school.  There are limits to everyone’s generosity and lets face it, industry will be heavily leaning on the suppliers and manufacturers to pony up.  No, we have to come up with a way to finance future roofing education, and its not just training facilities that require our dollars. 

The development of courses and curriculum, buying equipment and supplies, paying instructors, all require a sustainable revenue source.  The OIRCA Board of Directors has been grappling with this need for some time.  We know how they pay for education in other provinces.  Out west and in Quebec they of course fund education through their guarantee programs.

In Ontario we have investigated the potential of OIRCA getting into the guarantee business a number of times and most recently we determined that our current marketplace does not have an appetite for association-backed coverage.  We have a mature consulting industry and manufacturers control the warrantee/guarantee game.

Another option, and one that is not necessarily unique, is the surcharging of product sales.  Quite simply all suppliers and manufacturers who sell roofing related products directly to the roofing contractor would collect a percentage surcharge that would be added to the bottom of their invoice.

An independent third party would collect these remittances on behalf of the OIRCA and the funds would be managed by a Board of Trustees whose responsibility it would be to decide on how they should be invested and where they should be spent.

Just imagine how successful a program like this would have been over the past ten plus years.  The boom this industry has just gone through would have generated millions of dollars for roofing related education.  Okay, we missed out on that opportunity.  Once we get past the current downturn we will no doubt see a return to prosperity and the potential to raise significant funds for training our future roofers.

There will be those who argue that such a surcharge is just another tax, a tax that will make them less competitive.  The process I am describing is a pass through cost that will have little impact on the final cost of a roof.  All suppliers must be involved, every roofing related product will be eligible and all roofers and shinglers will participate.

The facility at Conestoga College is the start of our industry finally taking charge of our training needs.  It is the beginning not the end.  We must work towards providing all roofing workers in this province with access to first rate education.  A successful future for our industry demands it.