Government Operations Committee on June 5th, 2020

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you for your brevity, Ms. Van Buren.

We'll now go to our four-minute round of questions, starting with Mr. Aboultaif, for four minutes.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Good afternoon.

Ms. Bamford, my first question is for you. I know you're from the manufacturing sector. I worked in that sector for about 11 years. I understand that we have such a disadvantage: Our productivity is not great, and policies don't help to give us a competitive advantage, at least to produce for the local market rather than exporting product overseas.

Now we're on the verge of allowing suppliers to come forward, and you mentioned political interference in selecting suppliers. I've heard some complaints from small and medium-sized companies about how favouritism is given to major ones, especially for sole-source contracts and so forth.

Now we're at another stage, which is awarding licences for manufacturers to produce product. As far as I understand, we should have opened the door for smaller companies everywhere in the country to come forward, and given them the opportunity to produce product that we're going to need for a long time.

Do you believe there is political interference in awarding licences in manufacturing, and specifically for PPE?

[Jocelyn Bamford]

I'm going to also ask Catherine to comment on that, but I believe we need clear.... There's no transparency. There's no explanation for how those first five very large contracts were awarded and what the criteria for the sole-source awards were. There is a lack of small to medium-sized businesses being awarded when we, in the small to medium-sized space, can very rapidly provide parts and pieces. We can change on a dime. We're very nimble. We didn't see that.

In addition, with regard to infrastructure projects, I just want to mention that I have a picture here of a pipe within an infrastructure project in Scarborough. A water main being put in. Stamped on the pipe was “Northwest Pipe”, which is a company in Virginia. Canadian small to medium-sized companies are shut out under the “buy America” policy, but Canadian infrastructure projects have no issue buying pipe from places in the United States. We could produce that pipe here and we could coat it here.

I know Catherine has some comments on that, so I'm going to defer to her.

[Catherine Swift, Special Advisor to the Board, Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada]

Thanks, Jocelyn.

We were listening in on the early part of the presentation from the Department of Industry government officials, and I think the example of the N95 masks that came up was a classic example. It was a sole-source contract. Again, the transparency and accountability are not there. Nothing personal to the bureaucrat involved, but he couldn't answer your questions as to when these masks were going to be delivered. This is, of course, a pretty crucial piece of PPE.

Small to medium-sized firms always have trouble accessing government programs like this because of the massive amount of paperwork, bureaucracy and so on. That's always a challenge, particularly now, and everybody's trying to do things really fast, so that doubles the issues here.

Again, if there can be transparency and accountability...because there's none. In the case of this N95 company, the bureaucrat could not answer when there would be masks, so I think that was a classic example.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

I received—

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much, but unfortunately, Mr. Aboultaif, we're completely out of time.

We'll now go to Mr. Weiler for four minutes. Go ahead, please.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for joining us today. I have a number of questions related to the construction sector here.

What proportion of businesses in the construction sector have now reopened and have been able to rehire their employees, given that several provinces and territories have now eased the lockdown measures?

[Mary Van Buren]

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. That is still an inhibitor.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Absolutely.

I'll pick up on a number of my colleagues' questions.

What type of construction projects do you see as having the largest impact in creating jobs and leading to more long-term positive economic impacts for our country?

[Mary Van Buren]

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. If you look at roads and bridges in particular, they are in quite a sad state of disrepair. That's certainly one area, but going back to a previous question, it's very important that infrastructure investment be spread out across the country to all sizes of firms and to all regions so that as many people as possible can benefit in building Canada and in bringing clean water, education, hospitals, etc.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you.

As the lockdown measures ease, how do businesses in your industry ensure the health and safety of their employees and customers?

[Mary Van Buren]

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. We worked with the federal government as well to create a protocol, as Parliamentary Secretary MacKinnon said, and this is continuing; it's very collaborative. We will make sure we will do what is necessary for our workers and their communities and families.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Mr. Weiler, if I can interrupt, I notice that Ms. Swift has raised her hand. I think she may want to comment, if it's all right with you.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Yes, absolutely.

[Catherine Swift]

On the infrastructure project issue, I wanted to briefly add that right now, federally and in many provinces, there are restrictive bidding requirements, often limited to firms organized by a particular set of labour unions. That is frequently the case. This largely shuts out small and medium-sized businesses, because they are the ones that, for all kinds of good reasons, are not unionized companies, and yet they're fully capable and fully taxpaying businesses. A lot of research shows those kinds of restrictive, closed tendering requirements bump up the cost of projects by as much as 40%. At a time when everybody's broke after this crisis, it would be a very sensible policy to open up tendering to all qualified businesses.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go to Mr. McCauley for four minutes, please.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

That's great.

I want to thank all the witnesses.

Ms. Swift, it's great to see you. I enjoy your advocacy for small business and your tweets, so thanks very much.

With the limited time we have, I'm going to introduce the motion we submitted last week regarding calling PSPC, etc., to appear as witnesses for the estimates review.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much, Mr. McCauley.

Colleagues, Mr. McCauley's motion is in order, and it is debatable and amendable. We will open up for debate. If you have a comment or a question, please raise your hand.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

There is one thing: I realize the timing is difficult because of other things, so my suggestion is that we leave it up to the clerk to try to arrange the meetings. This is not necessarily to have the ministers appear before us, but at least the deputy ministers and other appropriate people as witnesses.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you, Mr. McCauley.

The clerk and I have been discussing the possible timing of this. As you know, we have meetings scheduled for next week and the week after. If we were to have a discussion on the supplementary estimates next week, we would probably have to cancel one of those meetings; however, there's a possibility we might be able to schedule a supplementary estimates discussion on the June 16. I will leave it up to the committee members.

If you have comments you would like to make, please raise your hand.

[The Clerk]

Mr. Green would like to speak, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Mr. Green, please go ahead.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

When they take it to the committee of the whole, I want to make sure that as a committee we've had a first crack at it, and not just some kind of overture. It's a priority of this committee. It's the work we're mandated to do, and I think it should be a priority for questioning at this moment.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you, Mr. Green.

Again, I'm telling the committee things they already know, but the four-hour discussion on June 17 is the only opportunity, unless there's a motion such as Mr. McCauley's, to look at the supplementary estimates before that.

Are there any other comments besides Mr. Green's before we vote on Mr. McCauley's motion?

I see none. We will call the vote.

(Motion agreed to: yeas 10; nays 0 [See Minutes of Proceedings])

Mr. McCauley, we'll go back to you. We have five minutes left in our meeting, and I did not dock your time because of the—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Thanks. I'll yield my time to my colleagues so that they can ask their questions, since I've used up enough for this.