We are trying very hard to build bridges to the conservative government and we've had some success. The particular phenomenon of a minority government is one that is going to make Canada look different. It is a short-term government with a short-term life span with an eye to the prize, that being a majority government. Our current government is going to be moderate, until the time that they get a majority. And as my dad told me when I was a boy, “Remember Tory times, that's the conservatives, are hard times for working people.”

The work picture in Canada: there is going to be more work in our business in the next 10 years than there has been in the last 50 years rolled together. The construction industry and the construction work force has grown by more than 45 percent in the last 10 years. This is an incredible bright spot in our picture. All facets of construction are growing: pipelines, highways, infrastructure, and especially industrial.

After the collapse of our industry in the '80s and another collapse in the '90s, we've got real growth happening, both in terms of volume of dollars and in terms of people. We should be very happy. Truth is, in the '80s — the high watermark of the building trades in Canada, — we had between 400,000 and 500,000 people in building trades unions. Those numbers have remained constant to this day.

The industry has grown from 500,000 people to 1.1 million. That means our market share is being eroded. Our opportunity now to grow is one that we have to sieze because if we miss it on this particular round of growth, we're not going to get a second chance.

The issue of the decade — and perhaps beyond — for the construction unions in Canada is the supply of skilled people at the work place, at the right time, in the right number, with the right skill sets, every time they ask us. Like you, we have thousands of issues that face us, but most of the issues that we've got in Canada are symptoms of the bigger problem.

The bigger problem is market share. And the bigger problem is making sure we own those highly skilled, motivated, drug-free, safe, and competent people who can go to work on any kind of construction by producing their dispatch slip and go to work without more [ado]. It's the thing that the building trades have relied on for the last hundred years. We've always got the work force there.

Recently we haven't always been able to supply the work force, and a number of the owners are now looking around and saying, "Well, these guys were great, but they didn't supply this job." There are a number of failures that they will forgive us for — the occasional bump on a job, the occasional problem — but they're never going to forgive us for not manning their work.