■ PALMER’S VIEW,
Pattullo Bridge replacement includes local hires, union-equivalent wages
Well before John Horgan became premier of B.C., he signalled his intention to give the unionized building trades the inside track on government-funded construction projects.
The NDP leader delivered a fence-mending speech to a building trades convention in the provincial capital a year before the official start of the election campaign.
At the time, April 2016, relations were strained between Horgan and the unions over his lukewarm support for big-ticket resource developments like liquefied natural gas exports and the Site C hydroelectric project.
But Horgan drew on his trade union roots (“I used to wear a hard hat at work to protect my brain, not just to get my picture taken”) and the way B.C. Building Trades executive director Tom Sigurdson had helped persuade him to seek the NDP leadership.
He also reminded the delegates how the NDP government of the 1990s gave the unions a huge piece of the action on construction of the $1.2-billion Vancouver Island Highway Project.
“I am not bullshitting you today,” declared Horgan, looking ahead to forming a government.
“You will be at the table with me.”
In the election campaign that unfolded a year later, Horgan touted 96,000 new jobs and a $7-billion top-up to scheduled capital funding for roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, housing, transit and other infrastructure. All to be built with targets for training, apprenticeships, local hires, and other benefits, NDP shorthand for what are called project labour or community benefit agreements.
Three months after taking the oath of office, Horgan fleshed out his intentions in a speech to a B.C. Federation of Labour conference on the future of work.
The future, he made clear, was unionization, via provincially mandated project labour agreements like the one that advantaged the building trades on the island highway project in the 1990s.
“Low bids might be good for B.C. Liberals,” declared Horgan. “But best bids are what we are going to do … Success stories like the Vancouver Island Highway Project can happen again.”
At the time of his speech in late October of last year, the New Democrats were in the midst of deciding whether to complete construction of the Site C project they’d inherited from the B.C. Liberals.
Weighing in on that issue at the NDP convention in early November was none other than the building trades’ Sigurdson, who quietly buttonholed delegates on the merits of proceeding with the giant hydroelectric project.
He also put forward a motion, passed by the convention, “to build all major publicly funded construction projects through project labour agreements that emphasize local hiring, apprenticeship opportunities, and jobs for underrepresented groups such as Indigenous people and women.”
Later that month, the building trades joined with other NDP supporters in releasing a pair of briefs commissioned in support of Site C. They made the argument that construction was already past the point of no return.
When the cabinet reached the same conclusion (much to the surprise of Site C critics), Horgan lost no time acknowledging the “tat” side of a tit-for-tat arrangement with Sigurdson and the building trades.
A new community benefits program with targets for apprenticeships, training and local hires was among the commitments in the Dec. 11 announcement that the New Democrats would complete Site C.
There was no changing the terms of contracts signed under the B.C. Liberals. But when B.C. Hydro in March of this year approved the $1.6-billion contract to build the Site C generating station and spillways, it included a 25 per cent target for apprenticeships, something the Liberals had vaguely promised but never delivered.
At about the same time as that deal was inked, the premier addressed the building trades, this time introduced by Sigurdson himself as “my friend John Horgan.”
Then came the payback. “The first project out of the door” under the NDP government, the $1.4-billion replacement for the Pattullo Bridge, would include a community benefit agreement guaranteeing local hires and union-equivalent wages, benefits and apprenticeship quotas. Plus it would be the first of many such agreements.
On Monday of this week the New Democrats released more details, amid news that the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure had taken the first step toward soliciting bids on the Pattullo replacement.
“The province has identified the objective for a community benefits framework for public sector infrastructure,” said the request for expressions of interest. “This will provide for good wages, increased opportunities for apprenticeship and training, maximizing participation of Indigenous peoples and groups traditionally underrepresented in the construction sector, and greater access for local residents and businesses.”
The successful bidder will be required to recruit the project workforce from a central agency the New Democrats are setting up in partnership with the building trades to administer the community benefits agreement.
Anyone wanting to work on the Pattullo and other public infrastructure projects will have to sign up with the NDP-run hiring hall. Within 30 days of employment on a given job site, any non-union worker — or any member of a union not in partnership with the NDP — will be required to join an approved union for the duration of the project.
Forced unionization in other words, and with selected, NDP-approved unions.
Not a surprise given what Horgan had been saying on this file for more than two years.
But nevertheless a sweetheart deal for organizations that have long supported the NDP in general and him in particular.
Anyone wanting to work on the Pattullo and other public infrastructure projects will have to sign up with the NDP-run hiring hall.