EDITORIAL Solidarity forever

If you want a job on a new B.C. government construction project, you will have to take out a union card. Premier John Horgan on Monday announced new rules that the province didn’t need and that make it look as if the NDP government is in the pocket of unions.

Horgan emphasized that new “community benefits agreements” are designed to promote hiring of local people, improve wages and create more apprenticeships on the billions of dollars’ worth of projects on the horizon. He skated over the part that said:

“Within 30 days of employment on the job site, any nonunion worker or a worker from another affiliation will be required to join the union for work specific to the project.”

This is a disturbing intrusion on the rights of individual construction workers, 80 per cent of whom don’t belong to a union. Many of them have no desire to pay union fees.

Just in case its opponents needed another stick with which to beat the government, Horgan is creating something called B.C. Infrastructure Benefits Inc., a Crown corporation that will control hiring on on these big projects. Favouring unions and creating new bureaucracy makes the new NDP look much like the old NDP.

More local hiring and more apprenticeships are worthy objectives, but there was no need to package them with a union-only rule and wrap the whole thing in a Crown corporation that is guaranteed to cost taxpayers more money.

The government should kill this idea before it goes any further.