Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me to be here today.
It's my pleasure to have the opportunity to speak to you. I'm a local Ottawa electrical contractor and small business owner. There are many schemes that we have to contend with in the construction industry. Free and open tendering is a very important one that shuts us out of being able to bid on projects.
Just this weekend I was reading The Ottawa Citizen and I saw that there was a tender for the Ottawa International Airport. If you read the fine print it says, “subject to local union affiliations”.
I find it rather disgusting that my tax dollars go into projects that I cannot bid on for no other reason than my employees choose to be union-free. About 70% of the construction workforce in the entire country of Canada is union-free, so it really shuts out a tremendous amount of companies very similar to mine.
The Ottawa Conference Centre is another classic example. It was a union-only project and shut us out. Perhaps there was no other reason than the fact that again my employees refuse to belong to a union. I shouldn't say they refuse to. They have the option to do so, if they so wish; they just choose not to.
We have stabilization funds that are utilized against us. These are funds that unions collect from their employees in order to use those funds to bid against us.
We have ratios. I'm not sure if you're aware that my company employs approximately 30 electricians and 10 apprentices. We are required to have three electricians for every apprentice that we wish to hire.
As an example, if my company was in Manitoba, where they have a 2:1 ratio, I could actually have 60 apprentices for my 30 electricians. We bring into the mix the Working Families coalition, an organization which I would say has been very strongly opposed to free and open tendering, and which likes to have many of these restrictions put in place. We realize this is more of a provincial issue than a federal one, but it's just one more issue that makes it very difficult for organizations and/or companies like mine to bid on these types of projects.
Thank you.