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 1984 and the Pennyfarthing condo complex – a labour battle we first wrote about HERE and HERE.
The interviews and other original research on which the ICBA50 series is based were conducted by writer Kevin Hanson. We appreciate Kevin’s work capturing the people, events, and milestones that shaped ICBA’s first half-century.
As union tempers and bullying boiled over at Pennyfarthing, the focus of attention shifted from the construction site to the courtroom – although not as quickly as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court would have liked.
Bill Kerkhoff
Lawyer Peter Gall (later named an ICBA Life Member) represented Kerkhoff Construction, and at this relatively early point in his career hadn’t handled a contempt application before. And while the picketers’ conduct clearly constituted contempt of court, Gall believed the principle of strictissimi juris applied. That would have meant proving specifically which individuals were involved, and he was working on compiling the necessary evidence.
That’s when he got a phone call from Allan MacEachern, with whom he happened to know, calling him in for an immediate meeting. McEachern was offended by the unions’ flouting of his order, Gall said, and unimpressed by the young lawyer’s cautious approach in this particular instance. “Are you crazy?” he recalled the Chief Justice asking him. “Get in here, we’ve got to end this.”
The contempt application was heard on Thursday, March 22, and Justice McEachern’s strongly-worded decision was delivered the next day. He began by noting that his order of March 8 had been “duly entered, served, and promptly disobeyed by hundreds of pickets who have unlawfully seized control of access to the site.” He cited the “explosive incidents” that had occurred when Kerkhoff employees and contractors had attempted to enter, and said he had no doubt that a serious riot could have resulted had Kerkhoff “not surrendered its construction site to unlawfulness.”
While there was insufficient evidence in relation to the Carpenters’ Union, the Building Trades Council was found guilty of criminal contempt, due to “the very active and substantial role played by its officers in the many breaches of Court order.” While saying he was mindful of the anger and determination of the picketers, McEachern warned that “no one should delude themselves into thinking that any artful or artificial devices will permit them to circumvent this prohibition [on continued picketing].”
Back at Pennyfarthing, picketers gathered around their radios at 10:30 a.m. to glumly hear the judgment. There was intense disappointment, along with a defiance on the part of some, who vowed to be there the next Monday despite the consequences. It set off a tense Friday afternoon and weekend of discussions and speculation about what was to come.
Gauthier and other leaders faced the possibility of large fines and even jail (sentencing had been deferred), and advised members to comply with the court order. Some picketers remained on site over the weekend, and Building Trades officers met with them in a nearby warehouse. “We’ve made that very clear to them, the consequences of being here,” said Gauthier. A long “strategy meeting” at the Operating Engineers Hall in Burnaby on Monday morning ensured many members had somewhere to be other than Pennyfarthing itself, although the mood was bitter and considerable anger was directed at the union leadership. “I think we should have pulled the whole goddamn province down,” said one unidentified attendee.
Bill Kerkhoff was understandably more upbeat in the immediate wake of the decision, telling the media, “we hope to be on the job Monday morning.” And so they were. Kerkhoff crews first arrived at the site beginning at 4 a.m. on March 26, cut the locks off gates, dealt with the safety risk of loosened bolts on equipment, and – most symbolically – tossed down a union flag from on top of a crane.
“With the help of acetelyne torches, bolt cutters and a court order, the Kerkhoff Construction company cleared the way to wide-open non-union construction in British Columbia,” reported CBC. While picketers had largely heeded the warning of the Chief Justice and were gone, some holdouts remained that first morning – their numbers eventually reaching at least 75 – making for a tense police-escorted entry as more Kerkhoff crews arrived. There was one more tire slashing and one more arrest. “It’s hard to work under this kind of conditions, but we have to work and we will work,” said Kerkhoff Project Manager Nick Eustace.
Fortunately, that didn’t prove necessary, and work proceeded smoothly from this point. “Essentially we carried on and the project went off fine,” Kerkhoff said. And as Peter Gall put it, “now the open shop sector is in the city”.
The intensity of the conflict at Pennyfarthing would not be repeated – at least not in Vancouver or any other major urban centre in B.C. The stage was now set for today’s reality, in which the large majority of the crews under Metro Vancouver cranes are open shop.
