National Defence committee  Mr. Chair, what do we do with the background documents?

National Defence committee  We usually don't get invited to those meetings or conversations. I know that we approached the Auditor General four years ago. We met with somebody in the Auditor General's office about some of the stuff going on around DCC. The AG had just finished an audit on DCC themselves and

National Defence committee  We didn't bring any evidence or any of our concerns to the Minister of Public Works. The Department of National Defence was it because they are the client. They are the one responsible for this $21 billion budget. When we identified that there was wasteful spending going on, I wo

National Defence committee  May I make closing remarks very quickly?

National Defence committee  Knowing what we're going through with the financial restraints and everything else, we completely understand the government's position that it is not going to reduce the armed forces lower than 68,000. If you're not closing bases, tearing down buildings, or ripping up roads or hy

National Defence committee  It was documented when we had national labour-management committee meetings with all the senior union reps—and the deputy minister co-chaired them with the labour rep. We brought pictures of an example. Three years ago we discovered that a contractor was flown up from Trenton, O

National Defence committee  It started, looking at DCC, not in a campaign context, in 2007 when we started bringing it up. We have the documents from the meetings when we brought Defence Construction Canada up. They were at the most senior level with the deputy minister and the committee I sit on. We also w

National Defence committee  The clear response we got was that there was no money in the salary wage envelope to pay the public service employees with the amount of work they had going on, so they would go to the O and M budget, regardless of what it cost. That is what we saw.

National Defence committee  There's a cap on the salary wage envelope budget that they've invoked themselves—the reduction and everything else. The operating and maintenance budget in a lot of cases gives a strong appearance of being a bottomless pit. So when we're looking at that we say we can't do all the

National Defence committee  A trajectory for escalating wage increases—not in these current times, but yes, that's part of it too. It still proves itself. From our own business case it's cheaper, when you include wages and benefits, to have the public sector do that work, and there's ownership at the end o

National Defence committee  No, we haven't gone outside. As I said, we don't know how bad it is—if we've just scratched the surface or if it's a lot worse. Just from the attention of the media yesterday, I am getting information from people who used to work for DCC, and they say that when they were there

National Defence committee  In the blink of an eye the work can be handed off to the private sector, and the costs aren't being challenged. When the mistakes are found and challenged, nothing's being done about it. Why not? So you would rather pay the bill twice to get something done that could have been do

National Defence committee  Thank you for the question. I'm very proud to have the bragging rights of our membership in terms of what we do to support the troops when they're deployed, when they're in theatre, and when they're not. We keep the buildings going on the bases. We turn on the lights; we turn of

National Defence committee  A lot of the members, I would say 80% of them right now, are products of the nineties. What I mean by that is that when the Department of National Defence was gutted, if I can use that word, in the nineties, they were part of that. They saw how much it hurt the capability of the

National Defence committee  Yes, and in the construction engineering trades, we realized, because of the demographics of our membership, they were getting to be a more seasoned workforce, and some day they would retire from those skilled trades. We were able to negotiate with Treasury Board, in our collecti