In my new role as President I am travelling around the Province to speak to members and get the message out to potential new members and three things have become clear to me.

 The first is that it is abundantly clear that there is a deeply felt discontent from contractors that government is making their lives harder by the year with insensitive bureaucratic rules that make running their businesses harder every year. Whether it is Card Based Certification, WSIB service, increasingly arbitrary MOL rules and prosecutions or irrational Labour Board procedures, the overwhelming sentiment is that things are getting worse.

The second point is how much the Merit OpenShop message needs to be told.   As an Association, we have a major job in educating Contractors and Clients on the issues, your rights and your liabilities. Most importantly, we need to encourage you to understand the problems and realize that if you or the Clients do not act to make our voices heard, things will not improve.  There is a common perception that problems come about because the faceless, unresponsive bureaucracy has it out for them and politicians are not up to helping. But this is simply not the case and as my mother used to say, "Nobody will listen if you're not talking." We have issues mainly for one reason; we do not have a loud enough voice in the corridors of power where we are up against constant effort by the Building Trades to push their agenda. They don't call them Organized Labour for nothing! We have to understand they represent only 30% of the industry and we have strength in numbers, if we can mobilize.

The third point is that most contractors, by nature simply want to get the job done, and have little patience for getting into the mushy double talk of politics and policy or understanding how much of what we are frustrated with comes directly out of municipal and provincial government in Toronto.  In Toronto, it is completely acceptable for a politician to stand up and say there is nothing wrong about disqualifying all open shop contractors and their employees from tendering on public projects paid for with their own taxes. It is also acceptable to say that you do not increase construction pricing by eliminating the majority of the competition, paying a premium on labour costs and imposing the most restrictive and inefficient work rules. For the next 5 years, Toronto is projected to tender over a $Billion a year in projects with Building Trade only labour restrictions and that means the power and the money to make the irrational acceptable. What starts in Toronto, could be on your doorstep next year; in your Municipality and you will be prevented from tendering for local projects.

I get questions on why I am so concerned about Toronto and I hope this puts it in perspective. I know contractors outside of Toronto would prefer if the place simple dropped into the Lake and they didn't have to hear about it anymore. Well, that is not going to happen and that means we have to organize and make the voices of the majority of the industry heard in the corridors of power.