Breaking New Ground—Stories from Defence Construction Breaking_new_ground | Page 25

James Stitt joined DCL in 1954. When he
retired in 1982, he was Vice-President of
Planning at Head Office in Ottawa.
You had to err on that practical side, because the decisions you were
reaching on those contracts were for National Defence—we were aware of
that, and sometimes went with quite unpopular requests for money because
they ate away at the construction budget from the department’s point of
view, but in construction you can’t avoid changes and unknowns. I think we
gained a reputation for being reasonable—not easy, but reasonable. The
ground rules were extremely well laid by Dick Johnson. We wanted to be fair
and reasonable, that was one of the great phrases.

BREAKING NEW GROUND
DEFENCE CONSTRUCTION CANADA
Tick, Tick, Tick…
Ottawa, 1952—Jim Stitt
Back in 1952, CMHC had a contract with DCL to provide and maintain all
personnel working on DCL contracts. The DCL Head Office staff were given
office space in the CMHC Headquarters building on Montreal Road, in
Ottawa. Eric Gold, then Secretary of CMHC, decided that a group of young
project engineers (Joe Bland, George Hay, Gerry Foley and I) was spending
too much money on long-distance calls. His response was to provide all of
us with three-minute kitchen egg timers to put on our desks, and to issue
instructions to keep long-distance calls under three minutes. I don’t think
we ever did.
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