ICBA celebrates 50 years of serving open shop construction this year, and we are looking back every week at some of the significant moments, milestones, and people who helped ICBA become Canada’s largest construction association.
Today, we wind the clock back to the spring of 1984…
All Ewald Rempel wanted to do was go to work. But the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of angry, jeering union members surrounding his pickup truck had very different ideas. The mob violently rocked the Rempel Bros. Concrete vehicle, with Ewald inside gripping the steering wheel with remarkable calm. They chanted, shouted, and called him a leach and a parasite. They slashed his tires and scored the sides of the vehicle with keys. They threw foul and smelly human waste at his truck.
Ewald and Ethel Rempel, ICBA life members
Ewald’s sin? As the Abbotsford business owner described it later that week to CBC TV: “I want to work and make a living and make a good living for my employees.”
It was just another day on the job site for British Columbia’s open shop contractors in March of 1984. Pennyfarthing was a condo development near the famed Granville Island market, and located close to all the big Vancouver media outlets, making the dispute front page news every day. The Battle of False Creek was on.
A larger lumber delivery truck, owned by Chilliwack’s Kerkhoff & Sons Construction, was also blocked that day. Company founder Bill Kerkhoff was the lead contractor on Pennyfarthing and would eventually have to go to court to get an in junction to allow his workers to have unimpeded access to the site. The judge slapped the unions with a $30,000 fine as well.
But back in March 1984, the mob exploded: more anger, more abusive language, more raised middle fingers. TV cameras captured it all, but the lawbreakers showed no sign of caring – their rage carried the day. Tires were deflated, while someone opened and poured something into the truck’s gas tank. “I don’t think you can stop these members right now,” building trades union boss Roy Gauthier said. “They’re mad – they’re frustrated about what’s happened.”
Some of the unionists had clearly lost all sense of reason. In a townhall-style discussion broadcast on TV, one of Gauthier’s members hurled this accusation at Ewald Rempel: “You mean to say because I belong to a union now – I’m an electrician – I have to suffer class war? I have to have this man divide me from my fellow citizens so that he can make a profit? So that he can send my kids and female members of my family to the streets for prostitution purposes?”
The building trades maintained their blockade of this large worksite in Vancouver’s usually peaceful False Creek neighbourhood for three weeks, with images of the lawlessness, intimidation and occasional violence dominating the evening newscasts and morning headlines. The B.C. trades union bosses and their allies knew this was a turning point in B.C. labour history, and they were pulling out all the stops to hold back the open shop progress.
Bill Kerkhoff, ICBA life member
(At the time in B.C., almost all construction outside of single family residential was done by the trades unions. Today, 85% of work is done by the open shop – a complete reversal that illustrates the stunning success of free enterprise, ICBA, and open shop over the past half-century.)
The matter was finally brought to an end when the Chief Justice of the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled the Building Trades Council was in contempt of court. Calling the situation a “tragic matter”, the Chief Justice said building trades officers had created an “explosively dangerous” situation, in which “unlawful intimidation and anarchy now prevails.” He said the events at Pennyfarthing could not be called a demonstration or a protest and were instead “unacceptable to all right-thinking citizens.”
Kerkhoff and Rempel (both future Life Members of ICBA – the highest honour the association can bestow) had followed the law – and had been met with lawlessness. By any rational measure, they had properly earned the opportunity to build the next phase of Pennyfarthing. But the building trades unions had no regard for such an outcome. For many British Columbians watching it unfold, it no doubt made for an unsettling revelation. Pennyfarthing laid bare the depths of the animosity the province’s building trades unions had for their emerging open shop competitors. It showed the lengths those same unions and their members and supporters would go to demonize their competitors, and impede their pursuit of the growing range of projects that were no longer restricted to union-only bidding.
For Kerkhoff, Rempel, and the other open shop contractors – those who had secured work at Pennyfarthing and the many more who were watching anxiously from around the province – the Battle of False Creek was merely a further escalation of their individual struggles of the past decade or more. But they were not deterred. They were on a highly principled, against-the-odds, and ultimately spectacularly successful mission to re-make the construction industry in British Columbia. And Pennyfarthing came to mark the beginning of the definitive end of the inequality of opportunity and lack of free choice, which the previous union monopoly had unavoidably created.
Today, the Pennyfarthing condos are an unobtrusive part of the backdrop to Vancouver’s scenic seawall near Granville Island. In March 1984, it was the site of a battle that changed the course of B.C.’s construction industry.
