Industry committee  If I can offer a quick corollary, language skills, communication skills, and soft skills are barriers to a lot of recent graduates ability to enter our industry, because that's a premium. We actually swung the pendulum too far one way.

Industry committee  No, not pure research. We have to support them with our overhead and our markup. There are exceptions; some firms have successfully developed patents because there was a particularly unique project. Most of the innovation takes place in the context of working for private client

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  Those firms that have the opportunity to do so will do so. In a cost-competitive market, it's a little more challenging. You have to add time to take time. You have to have money to make money. It's a little bit of that. Again, it's another one of these vicious circles. Some fi

Industry committee  The drop in enrolment was directly related to the real and perceived lack of opportunity. We talked about young people going into engineering. Frankly, I'm surprised anyone goes into engineering in our public school system. Nobody knows what engineering is in our public schools

Industry committee  First, our companies are like professional service firms. We don't have inventory. Our assets are people whom we charge out. In a cost-competitive market, it's often difficult to do in-house research, because you can quickly become very un-cost-competitive. That's not to say it d

Industry committee  I think the stimulus program was one of the great things that happened, and I have to give credit to Minister Baird. He never said this program was a strategic infrastructure investment; it is a job creation program. It did allow us to bridge until there was a certain bounce-back

Industry committee  Well, first of all, to go to a little bit of what we were talking about earlier, it's very difficult to invest in brand new employees, get them productive, and get them up to speed. It's not just about the salaries. Everyone who works on a project is in a high-liability field. Fo

Industry committee  I think it's sometimes the contrary. One of our strong suits in Canadian expertise is environmental protection and environmental remediation. We've been able to market that expertise all over the globe. Of course, any form of resource extraction has an environmental impact that

Industry committee  I don't believe it was I who referred to the incentives. I think that while those could be helpful, the bottom line, at least for our piece of the puzzle, is what Ms. Carter described. Our more pressing, critical need is for middle to senior management, the people who are, frankl

Industry committee  We were certainly pleased that there's going to be more opportunity, again through international development, for private sector participation. I think there's a lot we can do to augment the good work the NGOs do. In years past, it was actually what gave us some exposure in for

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  There are others. One of the challenges we have is that Canadian engineering, when we export, is quite excellent, of high quality, and very expert, but we're not cheap. Part of that is because of the standard of living we have and what we invest in putting in good people. I do b

Industry committee  It is a concern. One of the solutions has been to seek amalgamation with other people with deep pockets. The firms are doing extremely well, so the value of the shares, even of employee-owned firms, would be quite great, but there are very few people to sell them to. You're quit

Industry committee  Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee. I was thinking I don't get to see my colleagues nearly enough, so thank you for that opportunity. Our association represents about 500 private sector companies that provide independent consulting engineering services