Finance committee  Good afternoon. My name is John Gamble. I'm the president of the Association of Consulting Engineering Companies. We're grateful for this opportunity to appear before the committee. We are a national association that represents approximately 500 consulting engineering firms that

Finance committee  Thank you, and that's my presentation.

Finance committee  That's a very fair question. One of the challenges the public sector generally has is that you're subject to the tyranny of cash-in, cash-out annual budgets, and it's very hard for you to amortize costs. So you end up with the paradox where you must appear to save money regardles

Finance committee  Absolutely. By the way, we were very satisfied with the report of the Standing Committee on Government Operations. Hopefully this committee will throw its weight behind it. A professional service is not the same thing as purchasing equipment. It's not the same thing as straight

Finance committee  I did practise for ten years, but I'm the chief staff officer at the moment.

Finance committee  I'm going to answer this carefully. I think our members are quite happy to pay taxes when they feel they're getting value out of those taxes. They don't want to pay too much, and they don't want taxes going to things that don't benefit our quality of life here in Canada. Howeve

Finance committee  Good afternoon. I'm John Gamble, president of the Association of Consulting Engineering Companies. I'm accompanied by our vice-president of policy and public affairs, Susie Grynol. We're pleased to have this opportunity to appear before you. We are a business association repre

Finance committee  We'd simply like to conclude by re-emphasizing that it's our view that public infrastructure is a core business of government. That's not to say there can't be private sector involvement. Infrastructure must be considered an investment, not an expense. Embracing a long-term str

Finance committee  First of all, I want to be fair to all parties. The government made it very clear to us right from the onset that this was not a long-term infrastructure catch-up program; this was a job creation program, and I think on balance it was largely successful. The very rigid deadline

Finance committee  I agree that there is a very important distinction between the short-term programs and the long-term programs. Minister Baird was upfront with us from the beginning. We wanted long term; he was very clear that this was to address the short-term economic crisis. And in fairness, t

Finance committee  Yes. We haven't seen details, but certainly the suggestion is that he's prepared to take a pragmatic, flexible, and reasonable approach, and if that's the case, then we're very supportive.

Finance committee  It means ongoing.

Finance committee  Well, it's infrastructure forever, which employs everybody. The challenge we have is that infrastructure assets in many cases typically have 50-, 65-, sometimes 100-year design lives, and what we're trying to do is deal with them in annual cash in, cash out budgeting cycles, an

Finance committee  That's correct. As we say, we believe it to be a core business of government. That's not to say there's not a role for other partners, but it is a core business of government.

Finance committee  To clarify, we don't see a long-term investment strategy and a stimulus program as being mutually exclusive. In terms of the stimulus program being what it is, which was very clear to us, we accept the fact that there's a March 31 deadline, because you have to pick a deadline. H