Finance committee  Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance. My name is Kim Allen, and I'm the chief executive officer of Engineers Canada. Engineers Canada is the national body that represents the 12 provincial and territorial regulators o

Finance committee  —by provincial and territorial regulators. I have one last comment on dealing with skills. By 2020, over 95,000 engineers will retire, and there's a predicted demand of 16,000 new jobs. We urge the federal government to work on programs to attract women and indigenous people int

Finance committee  Sure. Thank you very much. I think the Gardiner Expressway is a very good example, a very visible example of infrastructure that is crumbling. Lots of our infrastructure is subsurface, and you don't see those things. The same types of problems are going on with various systems.

Finance committee  The number is extremely large. I think there's general agreement on that from everybody who's gone through it. You're talking in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure deficit. I'm not sure it's that important that we know exactly what it is. It's more i

Finance committee  Yes, absolutely. Infrastructure needs to be a life-cycle plan, so as soon as you build something, you have to plan how you are going to renew it, maintain it, and maximize and extend the life of it. This is really an ongoing plan. It isn't a program. It has to be the type of stra

Finance committee  It's 250,000. We have 12 members, but they represent 250,000 engineers.

Finance committee  No, we didn't. We did not specifically consult with members on that question. We had no comments on it.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  I'm not very familiar with his comments.

Finance committee  Yes, absolutely. The investment in infrastructure is the first step. You create the first round of jobs by actually going through redesigning, rebuilding, and putting the bridges and the infrastructure in place. The second round of creation is that it allows the flow of goods and

Finance committee  One thing I mentioned in my remarks is the concept of “licence-ready”. I was formerly the CEO and registrar of Professional Engineers Ontario and dealt very much at the front end with the licensing of the internationally trained. It's about how we get people whose credentials are

Human Resources committee  Thank you for the opportunity to appear today. Engineers Canada is the national body that represents the provincial and territorial regulators of the engineering profession. Canada's engineering regulators license 270,000 engineers across the country in all disciplines. This gro

Human Resources committee  Sure. Now is the time for—

Human Resources committee  I only need about 30 seconds. Now is the time for employers to provide more information to universities, colleges, and provincial and territorial governments about what they need from their employees. In recent conversations I've had with an employer, they indicate that they nee

Human Resources committee  Sure. Why we ended up developing the labour market system was due likely to the same issues that a number of your witnesses have talked about. It's just a huge, huge gap. To try to plan so people can end up with very successful careers, we're looking at how to actually sustain a