Every year, the federal government opens a window for Canadians to weigh in before the budget is released. OSPE never misses the opportunity to bring input and recommendations from Ontario’s engineering community to the national stage, and this is why:
Ontario’s Challenges are Canada’s Challenges
OSPE represents over 90,000 licensed professional engineers and engineering graduates across Ontario. That sounds like a provincial concern, and it is. But the priorities driving the engineering community, housing, grid reliability, workforce shortages, climate resilience, digital security, and transit, for example, do not stop at provincial borders, and neither do the solutions.
Federal dollars flow into Ontario infrastructure every day. Federal policies shape how engineers are trained, credentialed, and deployed. Federal procurement decisions determine whether public projects are built well or built cheaply. When Ottawa gets those decisions right, Ontario benefits. When Ottawa gets them wrong, Ontario engineers are often the ones managing the consequences in the field.
So yes, we care about the federal budget. A lot.
OSPE’s 2026 Recommendations for the Federal Budget
OSPE’s pre-budget submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance put 16 recommendations on the table. They are worth walking through, not as a checklist, but as a picture of what engineers see from the front lines of Canada’s biggest challenges.
The submission opens with a call for a National Integrated Energy Strategy. Canada’s electricity system is under pressure from electrification, industrial expansion, and trade volatility, all at once. There is no national framework aligning electricity, thermal energy, hydrogen, nuclear, and storage. That gap is costly, and it is going to get more costly. Engineers understand that the cheapest energy infrastructure is the one that was designed to last decades instead of years.
On procurement, OSPE renewed its long-standing call for Qualifications-Based Selection (QBS) as the federal standard for engineering services. Lowest-price procurement consistently produces higher costs over a project’s life through more change orders, more remedial work, and infrastructure that underperforms. With QBS, projects will be given to firms with the most relevant experience, and creative vision, resulting in infrastructure that will serve people reliably and establish Ontario as a leader on the world stage.
The workforce section of OSPE’s submission reflects an issue that OSPE hears from members regularly: there is a serious shortage of engineers where they are actually needed, and the pipeline has real problems. Most engineering graduates in Ontario do not end up in traditional engineering roles. Many internationally trained engineers arrive in Canada and spend years navigating credential recognition before they can practice. Interprovincial licensing still requires separate registrations, fees, and continuing education tracking in each province. These are solvable problems, but they require federal leadership and federal investment.
The submission additionally calls for federal leadership on indoor air quality standards for federally regulated workplaces, schools, and long-term care facilities. This is a public health issue with well-established engineering solutions. High-efficiency filtration, ventilation upgrades to current standards, and air quality monitoring are not experimental technologies. They are available, cost-effective, and underutilized. Federal investment here would pay off in reduced illness, better learning outcomes, and lower healthcare costs.
On water, the submission pushes for federal support of decentralized wastewater treatment and water technology innovation, including for remote and Indigenous communities. Canada has real expertise in this area. Federal investment has not kept pace with the opportunity, either domestically or in export markets.
The submission also addresses AI governance and cybersecurity together, because in engineering practice they are increasingly connected. Canada’s critical infrastructure runs on digital systems. Federal investment in security, and a capable workforce to manage digital systems is not an option.
Where money goes reflects what a government believes matters, and what it believes works. OSPE’s submission is an argument that engineering expertise, rigorously applied, is one of the highest-return investments a government can make.
Every transit line that gets built to spec, rather than reworked after the fact. Every building envelope that holds up against extreme heat rather than requiring an expensive retrofit. Every engineer who arrives in Canada with credentials and gets into the workforce within months rather than years. These are concrete, measurable outcomes and the benefit they bring to Canadians adds up quickly.
Ontario’s engineers are asking Ottawa to create the conditions where technical expertise can actually drive outcomes, in procurement policy, in workforce development, in infrastructure investment, and in the regulatory frameworks governing AI and digital systems.
The budget is one of the most powerful tools the federal government has to shape those conditions. That is why OSPE shows up every year to make the case.
We encourage you to continue the conversation on this topic by joining OSPE’s Online Community.
Leave a Comment