August 2018 Report

In Ontario, APP was an admirable attempt to catch up on infrastructure. A number of key recommendations made by the industry were not listened to and as a result, emphasis was only placed on one sector at a time. We saw massive building of hospitals for many years and while some of that work still continues, we are now shifting gears into transportation, schools and universities. What this means is that there are different forms of workforces to address these different types of projects: those involved in the ICI sector and those involved in transportation.

That shift into the different types of workforces will create new strain on an already diminishing workforce impacted by lack of apprentices and the lack of new workers wishing to join the construction industry.

Attempts to address these shortages through poorly thought out programs such as social benefits will not solve the problem we are facing and they do not solve the problem of the lack of investment in infrastructure. Without that investment how are we to fulfil the requirements of social benefit programs in hiring more workers when there is a shortage of funding to actually carry out the project's needed by not only the province but the country?

Despite our warnings over the years, we have continued down many wrong paths. We continue to advocate for a balanced, well thought out infrastructure project release plan, one that is based on need and not ribbon-cutting or self-promotion. Fact-based decisions need to be made to determine what are the key and most necessary infrastructure projects that need to move forward now, and not down the road because something else is more glitzy or eye-catching but does not actually address our problems.

Year after year, the reported spending on infrastructure contained in the province’s finances showed that the government had underspent its infrastructure budget from 2 to 3 billion a year. The questions have to be asked: Where was that money going? What was it intended for? And why didn’t it get spent?

For some time, the OGCA and many of its fellow associations have challenged the theory that we were spending massive amounts on infrastructure when the reality was that we’re just not seeing the outcomes that we should’ve seen. And that has left us in a precarious position to move forward. We need to rethink how infrastructure projects are delivered and financed, and the priority at which they are chosen, and it must be absolutely non-political. Whether it’s a municipal project, a provincial project or a federal project, it shouldn’t matter which political party had the idea. The decision to proceed must be based on the needs of the public. We do not want to see bridges and roads collapsing. We do not want to see continued shortages or substandard conditions in our hospitals, but these things will not be properly addressed if we continue to follow past practice.

Later on in this newsletter, you will see a fuller article on a recent report prepared by RCCAO, called the Infrastructure Update 2018. This report, like all of those prepared by the RCCAO, This has been well thought out, and researched by independent people without bias to provide us with a clear picture of what has been going on.

Not surprisingly, this report supports what I have said earlier in this article, and what we have been saying for years to government across the country. In 2017, only 2.8% of was spent on infrastructure, In Ontario and that is a combination of provincial and federal monies. The federal, part of that was only 0.4%. This is not acceptable and it will not address our problem.

To be fair, the federal government was looking at creating an infrastructure bank which it has now done, but in reality, this is more bureaucracy putting more roadblocks in the way of getting things done. In creating it, it only made more red tape, instead of finding ways to move forward quickly and efficiently with methods already established elsewhere, with the support and advice of those of us in the industry who are well aware of how to make this happen.

Unless there is significant change in political thinking and action in this coming year, infrastructure will continue to deteriorate and we will continue to fail to address that deterioration. Failure to address infrastructure has real consequences; we have seen those consequences across the world, most recently in Genoa, but we should not be so smug as to think that we are exempt from these kinds of disasters. In the last few years, we have seen examples where infrastructure has failed and is failing.

After all, one only needs to look at the ever-challenging Gardiner Expressway to wonder what we are thinking. With a new government in Ontario, one that has said that is for the people that it will go to the experts and ask for help, I tell you now that we in the industry, architects, engineers, contractors, subtrades and suppliers, stand ready to meet that challenge but time is not something we have a lot of.

It is time to move quickly and efficiently to address these problems and to ensure that there is sustainable funding provided on a long-term basis, using proven facts, methods and procedures to get the best value for the taxpayers and to ensure that we address this problem. Let us not ignore the warnings. The facts are there. It is time to act.