Canadians should be reminded that this was not always the case. The post-war immigration from the devastated European continent brought to Canada waves of highly-skilled workers, from bricklayers to machinists. It was the era of Avro Arrow airplanes, the St. Lawrence Seaway, CANDU reactors, and Canadarm. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way the word “trades” became a word depicting a realm of uneducated, unskilled individuals, locked in factories, manning assembly lines, deemed to toil in an anonymous background.