Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My name is Andy Manahan. I'm executive director with the RCCAO. Our group has been in existence for only four years. We are made up of both contractor associations and construction unions. We come to the table speaking on behalf of both labour and management, which I think lends credence to our comments.
You have my presentation that I provided in August, so I just want to provide some context. When we were all facing the prospects of a turning economy last year, we were pleased that many governments, not just in Canada but in the western world, were looking at infrastructure as a way to simulate the economy. Our labour-management alliance decided to come together in mid-January for a round table on providing advice on infrastructure stimulus funding to federal and provincial governments. We came out with a joint statement.
The partnership approach requires working together in difficult times. We recognized that we wanted to invest in the future. Our industry said that we were able and ready to meet the demand. Certainly there were some questions at the provincial government level about the capacity to deal with the major stimulus money that were going to be provided. We recognized, however, that there had been some under-investment over the decades. This isn't a partisan comment in any way. For the past 20 or 30 years, we have not kept up with the level of spending, based on a percentage of GDP, that occurred in the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s. This is a way for us to build confidence through infrastructure and investment, build sustainable communities, do things in a more innovative way, and have some lasting impacts. That was in January.
At the end of that session, our group thought that they should have another session to monitor the impact of the infrastructure funding. We had that meeting on October 8. The group thought that there must be a coordinated strategy. A lot of the projects are very good, but because of the process, the applications and so forth, a lot of contractor members have not seen tendered documents coming out from municipalities. We understand that there has to be due diligence so that funds are spent properly but in our mind, the so-called exit strategy that was talked about in the summer is the wrong approach. We would like to look at a long-term, predictable source of funding. We recognize that this is a bit of an anomaly in light of the increase in investment, but we need to look at life-cycle costing of assets together with a long-term and predictable flow of funding.
In the brief I submitted in August, the first recommendation was to base future infrastructure funding programs on a more rigorous priority setting and to set in place clear programs for sustainable long-term funding of infrastructure.
The second recommendation I put forward in the brief flows from that in that we recommended that an infrastructure simulation platform be developed and supported financially by the federal government. Our organization has looked at what other jurisdictions have done, from Singapore to Finland and even the United States. We believe there is a more objective way of dealing with infrastructure funding. We recognize that under the current program there were constraints applied with respect to deadlines. This meant that some of the projects were not of a high priority. The municipality said that it would not put forward projects that could not be finished by March 2011.
It's not a great criticism, but what we're trying to say is that we should look to the future and build a program that's a bit better. I had a conference call yesterday with the co-chairs of the National Round Table on Sustainable Infrastructure. We think this would be the appropriate body to house this infrastructure simulation platform. We'd certainly like to have more dialogue with various agencies about that.
Recommendation three calls for streamlining the environmental assessment approvals process. There has been a lot of work in accelerating applications, but to plan long-term predictable funding, we need to ensure that there is certainty and predictability in the approval process. We were most heartened that there had been some discussion between the federal government and the Province of Ontario with respect to minimizing duplication in these processes. I understand that this matter has been the subject of a court challenge, but we'd like to see some more action on that front.
Thank you.