Transport committee  The community benefits piece of it is certainly aspirational. We believe that infrastructure investment already generates significant benefits to the communities, whether that's clean water, care or education. Unrelated social aspirations should come out of separate funding. Infrastructure should be for infrastructure.

Transport committee  In the early days of the pandemic, the industry collaborated in an unprecedented way—to use the buzzword of the year—and shared health protocols. In fact, they were used as an example of what other sectors could use. We demonstrated that we could continue to work safely by prioritizing not only our workers, but also their families and communities.

Transport committee  Investor confidence speaks to our country as a whole and to how procurement and projects happen. When there's a lot of red tape, when we see projects that we think have a green light and then other things get in the way, like a regulatory process that is not as crisp as we thought, these are all barriers to how procurement can flow.

Transport committee  We look at all the projects that are being funded under the investing in Canada plan. Some are very small, $35,000, up to big ones, so yes, the work is getting done as it's being tendered, and contractors are moving on it. Again, the barrier seems to be more in moving it from the federal government to the provincial governments and then to the municipalities.

Transport committee  Again, it's very early days with the bank. I think maybe they had a bit of conflict in finding their footing in this new space and what role they could play. That is natural. In a new institution, there are already a lot of players. I think we placed quite a bit of expectation on them, given the infrastructure deficit.

Transport committee  The CCA very much holds free trade as a policy, and certainly, we advocate for that. We appreciate all the government's efforts on all the tariffs that have happened over the last few years. We want a fair level playing field for Canadians. Sometimes one of the issues is that the project is too risky for Canadian contractors, they won't take it on, and yet, it is still tendered.

Transport committee  If you're talking about federal contracts, those are managed by the federal government, and it has many great project managers. They certainly oversee the projects. In terms of international litigation, that is certainly beyond my area of expertise.

Transport committee  Thank you for your question. I will answer it in English. Overall, as I mentioned, the invest in Canada program is falling behind on the deployment of the funds. Why that matters is that the construction industry is inefficient, or we go into boom and bust. If, all of a sudden, there are a whole bunch of funds that close, their costs go up, and we don't have the workers.

Transport committee  Yes, absolutely, and in fact, that's why we're looking for a 25-year commitment to infrastructure investments, so businesses could invest not just in their workforce but also in innovation. A question was asked earlier about productivity. One of the challenges the industry has is that the low-cost bid is often chosen, and most of the risk falls on the contractor.

Transport committee  The Government of Canada has a great resource, which is the infrastructure progress tracker. You can see, province by province, how the funds are or aren't flowing. It's pretty dismal right now. If you look at provinces like Ontario, there is something like $8 billion that still hasn't flowed from 2018 commitments.

Transport committee  Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today. I am speaking on behalf of the Canadian Construction Association's 20,000 member firms who operate across Canada as general contractors, trade contractors, civil and professional manufacturers and suppliers who work, obviously, in the commercial side, institutional and industrial sector.

Government Operations committee  That is their number one goal, and that has been a culture for many years. Adapting is not new to us. The industry was extremely collaborative and came together and shared all kinds of best practices. As you can imagine, best practices were changing daily, sometimes hourly. CCA itself has a whole page of resources.

Government Operations committee  I don't have those statistics, but would be happy to look into getting them to you. I think part of the question is also around productivity, so even if workers are fully coming back, there's still a productivity gap, as we've said, because of things like sanitation. We've heard it takes up to one hour per worker per day as workers are coming in, getting screened, cleaning hands and cleaning tools, etc.

Government Operations committee  Again, one of the things that we've asked for is a 25-year commitment to infrastructure from the federal government to avoid booms and busts and also to minimize quick knee-jerk reaction. We think that would be very helpful in setting priorities. If you look at the Canadian infrastructure report card that we published last year, you'll see that we've assessed the seven asset classes of infrastructure.

Government Operations committee  Attracting skilled labour to the aging workforce is a priority for the entire industry. We have many apprentices already in that stream who are looking for employment. You are right that continued delays mean those apprentices are delayed in their training, which takes quite a while.