Construction boots this budget season

It’s government?#budget?season. Budgets this spring could be the most consequential in decades – navigating this time of war, pandemic, cost of living (inflation), climate change, and jobs and growth to lower deficits. A very wise person once said to me that times of uncertainty create opportunity for change and also require a renewal of confidence.

In Ontario and Quebec, it will be the last budget before campaigns. In Ottawa, it will be the first one since the federal election. One of the things that I learned inside government is that Ministers’ mandate letters set the tone and give marching orders, and shape budgets. The recent mandate letters from the Prime Minister to his Ministers start the clock ticking on the scoreboard of ‘promises made, promises kept’. It’s worth taking note of a few key points in the mandate letters that are relevant to the?#infrastructure?and?#construction?sector.

For example, attracting private and institutional capital into infrastructure, incentivizing clean energy and technology investment to accelerate the shift to net-zero, advancing inter-regional rail and energy mega-projects of national significance, creating new standards to make buildings more energy efficient, pursuing ways for construction to buy clean, new investments to increase affordable housing supply (with municipalities), updating procurement practices.

When looking at them in sum, rather than the individual parts, mandate letters add up to a bigger picture of the ambitions and motivations of the government. I am probably among the few in the private sector who read them. The Minister of Infrastructure and Communities recently appeared before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transportation, Infrastructure and Communities regarding his mandate. I watched it.

Ministers and their teams will need extensive engagement with entrepreneurial businesses to deliver, especially when it comes to infrastructure. Getting shovels in the ground while getting more out of each project – whether greenhouse gas reductions, high quality jobs, accelerated growth from new investment – will not be easy. Government will need business to get the job done.

During the peak of the pandemic, private and public sectors did extraordinary things working together. In the infrastructure space, decisions had to made quickly and wisely to keep people safe on construction sites, stabilize risks that could knock projects off-track, adapt with agility so that companies didn’t go down with every rise of a new wave of infection. And the urgency of the situation required problem-solving like never before to rapidly build health-related infrastructure, from long-term care facilities to vaccination factories. All the while, other core infrastructure continued to be built.

The budgets this spring are a way to redouble the determination of the last two years to shift from crisis management to long-term momentum in infrastructure and construction.