Thank you.
Where do I begin?
Never mind the cost of materials—we've all heard about lumber and wood, steel, aluminum and components for HVAC systems. You just name it, and there's an issue either with the delivery, the overall availability or the cost. For some things, they only hold the prices for 24 hours. How do you bid on something when you don't know what the price will be next week?
There's that side, and we're struggling with labour. As I said, we haven't gotten everybody back. I think the retirements that we've all talked about for years are starting to really roll out, particularly in the trades. That's hard, physical work.
Productivity is behind, and as I said, there are a lot of issues that are overlapping each other. The fact that the industry has done well and maintained safety standards better than most is a positive.
Whenever you're planning infrastructure, one thing you have to consider is who's going to bring it to fruition, and that is constructors and workers. We have to plan, too, in terms of training and having that labour force available.
The worst thing that could happen is that the market for construction gets hot, and then there are a whole bunch of additional public sector expenditures on top of that. Then you're in an over-heated market, and you have another set of issues that arise coming out of that.
Anything where the plans can be a little more consistent over time and there's a sense of what's rolling out each year.... It obviously will need to be adjusted. This is a fluid situation. Construction always is, but the more planning there is, the more everybody is on the same page knowing what's happening over a shorter period of time.
It can be readjusted, but to say that a program is going to put out a lot of money in these years, no matter what's happening in the market, that's going to create problems for everybody, for municipalities, for governments, for the private sector and for the construction industry itself.
This pandemic has created a hit to training. It's still going on, but it's reduced. We have capacity constraints and everything else, trying to keep everybody safe and moving forward. To say that the industry is operating at full capacity is not accurate.