ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
In the context of a project to rebuild the maritime jetties at the Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt, located on the territory of the Esquimalt and Songhees nations, in British Columbia, Charles-Étienne and the project team organized an employee cultural training session with the Songhees nation. They also chose suppliers that employ First Nations workers, including a caterer from the Son- ghees nation in order to discover their tra- ditional cuisine. In addition, they will offer a worksite experience to Indigenous appren- tices that could then lead to a job.
This is the type of initiative that could improve the socioeconomic conditions of Indigenous peoples, while enabling the construction industry to grow its labour pool and contribute to the reconciliation process.
Supporting our people
Attracting and retaining a skilled, motivated and stable labour force is more crucial than ever, and we re doing it well. Our culture of family, col- laboration and compassion no doubt accounts for much of our success.
We continue to put an enormous amount of effort into training, implementing workplace health and safety measures and fostering career development in order to offer our teams a stimulating work environment and advanta- geous working conditions. We also want to ensure their commitment as well as their physi- cal and mental wellbeing, while giving them the opportunity to realize their full potential.
But we want to take this even further. That s why we ve adopted a strategy to ensure there is a reflex of diversity, equity and inclusion in our practices and business processes. We believe that everyone should have an equal opportu- nity to realize their potential and be success- ful, regardless of origin, age, identity, gender expression, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political opinion, civil status, family
situation or disability. Our goal is to help to inspire the construction industry as a whole to embrace these values.
Our plan is both agile and ambitious. Our imme- diate goal is to promote cordial and respectful relationships across the board. To encourage this, we first adopted a declaration that for- malizes our commitment to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, and will then ensure that these values are better incorporated in the way we conduct our activities.
Environmental experts join our project teams
Stacy is an environmental consultant. She is a member of our site team working, among other things, on the construction of a new transportation centre for the Société de trans- port de Montréal. Some 20 other experts like Stacy including geologists, biologists and engineers are looking at how to mitigate our project footprint. Our team will continue to grow across Canada.
All of this expertise is now in house, and is benefiting our clients over the entire lifecycle of their projects from our service offer through to delivery. We re able to estimate the necessary resources, prepare the environmental docu- mentation, coordinate the consultants work, and obtain the permits and authorizations as well as LEED, Passive House, Green Globes, Envision, Zero Carbon certifications, among others. We also follow up in terms of water, air, noise and vibrations, soil management, plant and wildlife protection, inspection of work to ensure compliance, carbon offset programs, as well as sensitive habitat and wetland restoration programs.
We are working toward ISO 14001:2015 certi- fication in 2022, which will attest to the per- formance of our environmental management system.
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