Transport committee  Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you very much for having me here. I'd like to congratulate the committee for doing this work. I think it's very important. I'd also like to express my gratitude for your work in Parliament on all fronts. My name is Brian Dijkema. I'm the program

Transport committee  Thanks very much. I actually never said that if people were not unionized things would be better. What I said was that there are a variety of ways of organizing labour, including new unions, and various ways of organizing even unionized workforces. What I said was that it was not

Transport committee  Again, and I'm sorry if I'm not being clear, but it's not a matter of using P3s or using traditional procurement methods. Our concern as a think tank is to ensure the variety of ways in which Canadian workers choose to organize themselves on the ground in the construction workfor

Transport committee  We are not suggesting the rules for procurement need to be reduced per se, although I'd like to see rules that are efficient and provide the best value for tax dollars. Our concern is that closing tendering to one particular party, or one particular organization, is a recipe for

Transport committee  Yes, it is true. There are six choices and that's it. It's very easy for those groups to collude. You don't actually have a non-union choice in Quebec. Not that I'm particularly in favour of that over the others, but I would encourage a wide variety, a wide spectrum. That full s

Transport committee  Yes. In fact, our work has done a survey of the various estimates that are out there. Those estimates range, as I said, from 2% to 40%. If you look at the City of Hamilton report, on the estimate of increase on one particular project, the low bid for this project was 83% higher t

Transport committee  Yes, there are a number of papers. The OECD has a number of papers on that.

Transport committee  Yes, I can certainly find those and pass those along to you.

Transport committee  I'll have to go through my files, but I can pass them on.

Transport committee  We've done a review of the municipal budgets at stake in Ontario alone, and our estimates suggest that if the region of Waterloo—we're talking about the whole region—is subject to closed bidding, that will be almost $942 million at stake. I think that is a big problem. That's j

Transport committee  Right. There are a number of other studies. The closed tendering issue also affects school boards in Ontario. This one was a provincial focus on school boards. It also affects major energy producers, and so on. We are going to be looking at that. Those should be released this ye

Transport committee  We are hoping to undertake such a study. What is needed is a counterfactual, of course—and I don't want to get into scholarly debate in this. What's key to note is that there are two things at play here. One is that the City of Hamilton estimate, which was 40%, for instance, is

Transport committee  Yes. That has been updated now. Would you like me to answer?

Transport committee  If Waterloo remains open, as it currently is.... Its case is in front of the OLRB. Without Waterloo, 26% of Ontarian taxpayers—and I think that's about 11% of all Canadians, because Ontario is so populous—are subject to closed bidding. It's the 26% number there. Among all Ontario

Transport committee  We surveyed 44 municipalities. We didn't survey all the municipalities, because there were too many.