Question To Minister Qualtrough: What is Public Services doing to promote community benefits?

Hon. Ratna Omidvar: Thank you, minister, for being with us today. Like you, I can get very excited about procurement as well because I understand the levers that are embedded in it, so my question is on community benefits.

As you know, Toronto, where I come from, is home to the country’s largest transportation project, the Eglinton Crosstown, and through provincial legislation and investments, the regional transportation authority, Metrolinx, has agreed to devote 10 per cent of the work hours, which is roughly 300 jobs, to disadvantaged community members living along the new light-rail line. I can tell you, of course, what a huge and positive impact this will have on the local community.

So as the Minister of Public Services and Procurement, you are entrusted with entering into contracts large and small across the country. So what is your department doing to promote this concept of community benefits in your procurement efforts, and will your government be supporting Bill C-344, which will inject language around community benefits into your job description?

Hon. Carla Qualtrough, P.C., M.P., Minister of Public Services and Procurement: Thank you. So, absolutely is the short answer to your question, ma’am. I think that any world class, cutting-edge procurement system will use, as you recognized and as I have said previously, the levers of procurement to advance broader social and economic benefits, maybe beyond the bottom line, if you will.

Bill C-344 gives us an opportunity as a government to ascertain, once a bid is successful and through the life of the project and afterward, the community benefits that particular project has yielded: How many jobs? What kind of green initiatives were included? Were there specific initiatives targeted to marginalized populations?

The benefits of that, of course, are two-fold. First, we are getting data we don’t currently have. We can’t tell you with any certainty how many Aboriginal youth were employed by any different contract put out by the Government of Canada, and wow, what a powerful number that would be if we could. That’s what we would like to get to.

Second of all, we can then use that information to drive the development of future policy and programming decisions and decision-making, because we can tell you that, “Wow, we are not getting to the people who could benefit most from these contracts,” because the way the contract perhaps was procured inadvertently excluded a group we really want to target.

I think it’s a very powerful lever that we will be able to use as the data is collected and as we move forward on other initiatives, like our Aboriginal procurement strategy or embedding accessibility into our procurement initiatives. Moving forward alone, having both the economic and the social data, will really help us make better decisions as a government.