I think the Member makes really good points, all things that I have considered. I am in one of the engineering companies that does not have the people to bid on something. Another part that we see often is, as stated, the downturn in Alberta occurred. We had a lot of people who started to buy work in the North. That is a problem, and that is again, I guess, back to the negotiated contract versus the RFP-type conversation, because I cannot go out and tell a company not to lower their rates of their employees to win a job. So I understand that that has to now be coming back into the RFP and how we are writing that and how we are scoring people and holding people accountable when they are proposing to put certain people on projects but also building in the training capacities, like you talk about.
I think, as we move to more virtual business anyway, it will be very hard to force people to open up brick and mortar offices in the North, but I totally know what the Member is saying, and it's all part of the conversation that we are having as part of the procurement review and part of a larger conversation that we are having as a Cabinet in the sense of not just looking at dollar for dollar but looking at those intangible or indirect benefits of, you know, if we spend the $200,000 with the northern company, well, that saves 10 employees from going on unemployment, so are we going to start factoring in that amount of money for IA into the change in that bid? I mean, we cannot do that in the bid scoring, but we need to start changing the mentality so that we recognize that the lowest bid is not always the right bid or the best bid. Most engineers will fight for quality-based selection, where you don't even start talking about money until you have actually made it through the technical bid and you've chosen a firm to negotiate with.
Unfortunately, I think, with the way our financials are set up, it will not work. Because we do not start until April, we miss our field season, and that is actually a good point I should make on procurement with contracts. Because of the setup of the money not coming till April, it really forces the Department of Infrastructure to have to do stuff very, very quickly because our client departments are not coming to us until they have their funding, to say, "I want to build this project." All of a sudden, we are finding out in May we need to start building projects this summer, and, a lot of that, it gets delayed. I saw it in my own work, and I have to think it's impacting the entire departments overall. I had a conversation with someone, "It would be great to shift to January-January," because then we'd actually have four months of winter to plan what we are doing in the summer. I think that does add to some of this problem that is occurring. Thank you, Madam Chair.