Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Committee members, fellow witnesses, and ladies and gentlemen, I'm pleased to be with you this afternoon to represent the Canadian Public Works Association. Thank you for inviting us to participate in your examination of federal government investments in federal, provincial, and municipal infrastructure over the past 20 years.
Members of the CPWA are often unseen and unheard, but we are ever present in the lives of most Canadians. When you turn on your kitchen tap and clean water comes out, that's us. When you approach an intersection with traffic signals, that's us. When the snow is plowed in front of your home or business, it's the public works department of your community at work.
Canadians do not generally know CPWA members are also an essential part of the first responders teams when emergencies and natural disasters such as major floods hit cities and towns across the country. We clear public roadways of snow, ice, and other obstacles for police, ambulances, and fire trucks to respond to emergency situations. We ensure water comes out of the hydrants when firefighters are on the scene to fight a fire.
We have a great interest in all things related to the construction and maintenance of public infrastructure across Canada. Our focus is on what we believe to be an exciting future for public infrastructure in our country.
The new building Canada plan announced in budget 2013 and the new public transit fund announced a few weeks ago in budget 2015 represent an excellent opportunity to build, rebuild, and refurbish much needed public infrastructure across the country. We believe that with this opportunity comes an obligation to ensure Canada’s new infrastructure investments are built to endure and are managed effectively.
As we look to the future, our focus is on two policy issues: asset management and sustainable infrastructure.
We think the single most important issue to consider and plan for when significant investments are being made in public infrastructure is proper asset management. Extending the useful life of major infrastructure assets by insisting upon proper asset management practices respects the prudent expenditure of public funds. It also keeps community infrastructure safer for longer.
A holistic approach to managing municipal infrastructure assets is being practised in other jurisdictions such as Australia and New Zealand, and is also making inroads in Canada, particularly in our western provinces. Canadian municipalities have a growing interest in applying proper asset management principles and practices to the infrastructure they are responsible for planning, building, operating, and maintaining.
One of the issues is that municipalities often need resources dedicated to building capacity at the local level in order to undertake proper asset management assessment practices.
As you think about the future of public infrastructure investments, we hope you will agree there is an important role for the Government of Canada to play in promoting asset management and capacity building within municipalities. We believe dedicated funding would be beneficial.
The second issue I'd like to summarize for you this afternoon is sustainable infrastructure.
The principles of sustainable development are now considered to be fundamental to how civil engineers and the public can more successfully address the return on investment in infrastructure and meet today’s societal needs. These concerns have led to the development of sustainability rating systems that provide a holistic framework for evaluating and rating the community, environmental, and economic benefits of all types and sizes of infrastructure projects. These include not only the roads, bridges, waste-water treatment plants, and public parks municipalities deal with, but also the massive infrastructure projects such as pipelines, airports, dams, levees, power transmission lines, and telecommunications towers.
Our association believes in adopting and adapting best practices where possible, which is why in our written submission we provide an example of a sustainability rating system that has been developed in the United States called Envision. Used as a planning tool for projects, rating systems such as Envision can help identify sustainable approaches during the planning, design, construction, and operation of infrastructure.
In closing, Mr. Chair, here again we see a potential role for the federal government to play. The government could consider taking a leadership role in supporting the use of sustainability rating tools and systems for evaluating and rating the community, environmental, and economic benefits of all types and sizes of infrastructure projects.
Mr. Chair, I will leave it there, and I look forward to questions from the committee members.