Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank you and committee members for providing the Canadian Construction Association with the opportunity to appear before you today.
Our association represents the non-residential side of the construction industry. We build Canada's infrastructure. We have an integrated membership structure of some 70 local and provincial associations from coast to coast to coast in Canada, with a membership of just over 17,000 member firms, over 95% of which are small and medium-sized businesses.
The construction industry employs just under 1.5 million Canadians, or nearly 10% of Canada's total workforce. Our construction market is projected by international economic projections to be the fifth largest in the world by 2020, behind only China, the U.S., India, and Japan.
Our pre-budget submission addresses the areas of economic recovery, growth, job creation, demographic change, and productivity.
With respect to Canada's continued economic recovery and growth, it will probably come as no surprise to you that we continue to emphasize the importance of ensuring that Canada's key critical public infrastructures—its highways, roads, bridges, seaports, border crossings, inland trade routes, water treatment facilities, water distribution systems, schools, and hospitals—are not only repaired and restored, but improved and maintained. Why? Because there can be no economic growth without state-of-the-art and well-maintained critical public infrastructure.
Canada's critical public infrastructure is our national economy's health care plan. Despite the fiscal challenges, we cannot reduce our efforts to rebuild, improve, and maintain our vital infrastructure. We must not repeat the neglect of the past.
We very much support the focus of the current economic action plan on economic growth. Economic growth cannot occur without state-of-the-art public infrastructure. The current $33-billion Building Canada plan comes to an end on March 31, 2014. In order to ensure no gap in funding and not to lose a construction season, the new plan's successor long-term infrastructure plan must be part of the next federal budget.
We are hopeful that this summer's consultations with stakeholders around the country on the new federal long-term infrastructure plan helped reinforce the importance of ensuring that this plan continues and that we continue our sustained effort to ensure that Canada's infrastructure is world class. From our perspective, the long-term infrastructure plan must be truly long term, must be funded at a level equivalent to that of the current Building Canada plan, and must be flexible enough to meet the changing needs of the diverse regions and participating partners.
In addition to the next long-term infrastructure program, we also believe the federal government needs to provide greater support and certainty for municipalities in the maintenance and rebuilding of their key municipal infrastructure. To this end, we commend the government for continuing and making permanent the gas tax transfer fund of $2 billion annually to municipalities; however, we would like to see that indexed so that it is not eroded over the years by inflation.
That brings me to my second recommendation on red tape. As an industry, we strongly support the efforts of the government to reduce the regulatory burden on small business, chiefly in areas where provinces or municipalities already have robust regulations essentially performing a similar function. Signing interjurisdictional agreements to deliver joint services, harmonizing regulations where possible, and creating a single federal-provincial service delivery window for small business would all be welcome. Certainly, your efforts in the area of environmental assessment and, indeed, the recommendations to the red tape commission, are positive movements.
With respect to the needs of our workforce of the future, and in training especially, we very much support the reforms that are being made to our permanent immigration system and also to our temporary foreign worker program, especially the measures that will see employers more involved in the process. With that, we commend the recent announcement by the government to bring in an expression of interest program for skilled worker immigration to Canada. We think that's a very positive step. We would certainly want to have it ensured by this committee that the necessary measures and resources to put that in place are there.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I will conclude my remarks. I look forward to your questions.