Ontario’s 2008 CanCon law stipulates that 25 per cent of the overall value of the system’s Alstom Citadis Spirit vehicles in both material used and labour employed to build them had to come from within Canada. Not meeting that threshold would put the province’s $600-million commitment to the overall cost at risk, the report said.Sign up to receive daily headline news from the Ottawa SUN, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.
“There was no broad pool of skilled labour available to draw from in Ottawa — a city whose economy is not focused on manufacturing, much less on the specialty of train manufacturing,” Hourigan wrote.Article content “Still, the relative inexperience of the workforce had the potential to lead to quality issues that would be less likely to occur with a workforce that has been building trains for years,” Hourigan wrote. “In the case of the OLRT1 project, the inexperience of the workforce may have resulted in problems, such as defective wiring that then had to be fixed, adding to delays.”
As one Alstom executive told the inquiry: “It becomes very problematic to cycle up a workforce of 100 to 150 people for 18 months to two years … and then say, ‘Goodbye, we don’t need you.’”Article content