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The company gets approached all the time to go public but it would be irreversibly different if that happened, Filipchuk says. No longer would the focus be on what can be shared with the company shareholders. “We don’t have some of the unhealthy behaviours that come from chasing quarterly targets or top-line revenue growth.”

Some competitors are driven to bring in whatever work they can get, but PCL can be more discerning.

“It’s easy to bring in backlog,” Filipchuk says. “What’s harder is successfully executing, turning that into profit and dividends.”

Like many business leaders, Filipchuk is worried about government over-regulation in Canada. “Right now Canada’s competitive is at risk because of over-regulation,” he says.

Canada long had a way for government and business to work together to deliver infrastructure but additional requirements and new and aggressive interpretations of old rules have put up major hurdles to success, he says.

“We know that the way we execute work in Canada, and the outcomes and the environmental impact, it’s better here than anywhere else in the world,” Filipchuk says. “We hold ourselves to higher standards than almost anywhere else, and yet we can’t get past these hurdles in order to develop our resources here and get the market access that we need by pipelines and other means. It’s hard to watch and we’re feeling the effect of it in Western Canada for sure and in Alberta in particular.

“Unless we can find a way to take a step back and recognize that the way that we conduct ourselves in this country is already at the highest international standard, we don’t need to try to go beyond that … it’s going to continue to be really, really hard to get out of the rut that we’re in.”

dstaples@postmedia.com

@DavidStaplesYEG