Thank you, Chair.
I've got a series of questions for Engineers Canada about what we can do around infrastructure spending to make sure that we are using this opportunity to get more women into the workforce. I think we've heard testimony from other witnesses that there could be unintended consequences, that investments in traditional infrastructure might overly benefit men and not so much women, if we don't have women engineers and workers in the field.
We heard earlier at this committee from a Simon Fraser University professor about a success story in my backyard, which I'd forgotten about because it happened 25 years ago. The Vancouver Island highway was a success story in boosting the number of women employed in infrastructure projects, so I'll just read a couple of things that she said. The highway was going to “pass through first nations land, so they had to have equity initiatives there, and at the same time we had a government”—it happened to be New Democrats— “that was committed to equity.” She continued, “What it required was a considerable degree of compulsion on the part of the government initially, because neither contractors nor unions wanted this. A specific clause in the agreement saying that employment equity hiring 'shall operate in priority' over other kinds of hiring is also extremely important, as is supportive leadership at the highest level.” Furthermore, “Women went from being 2% of the labour force at the beginning to being 20% at a particular point in time.” Finally, she added, “I do want to say that this is the kind of thing that was heard at the beginning of the Vancouver Island highway, and afterward the employers and the unions were both very, very happy with what had happened. The women got hired and the company was happy to hire them afterward”.
That was testimony on February 9.
Do you have other examples of models like that, where government intervention pushed through and then created an opening for the next wave of women and where in the procurement process they said, you're not going to get the contract unless you demonstrate that you have a certain percentage of spaces open to women, to indigenous people, to apprentices?