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.
With Canada Day this week, it seemed fitting to wind the clock back to the late 1980s and see how ICBA’s message of opportunity and fairness spread nationally.
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.
ICBA started in Trail B.C. in 1975, but in the late 1980s, president Philip Hochstein started looking east for allies – and found one with the formation of Merit Alberta in 1986.
Stephen Kushner, who served as Merit Alberta’s president for 28 years, says he and Hochstein first met as young leaders of fledgling and controversial associations, and “probably the only friends we had.”
“We formed a natural alliance very early, supporting the values of open shop and trying to find a place for our members where they could compete and function and survive and prosper,” remembers Kushner. “Clearly by the late 1980s, early 1990s, you had this dominance by the non-union open shop contractors in both provinces, and to the point where some of the players were the same.”
Unions protest the first Open Shop national conference in Banff in 1990
In 1990, the two associations collaborated to organize the first national open shop conference, held at the Banff Springs Hotel that March. It attracted attention and controversy from the outset. Alberta Labour Minister Elaine McCoy came under strong pressure from the NDP and unions in Alberta to revoke her acceptance of an invitation to speak, and Hochstein says there was a lot of uncertainty as to whether she would show up. Immediately ahead of the conference, unions were promising that well over 1,000 protesters would be bussed to the event, and that there would be walk offs at construction job sites. It made for a dramatic lead up. “The RCMP was very involved, they were concerned about the picketing,” says Kushner. “The hotel itself was concerned about the violence that could be done in their facility, and we were quite concerned about the safety of all of our delegates.”
The protest materialized, although not on the scale promised. Minister McCoy came but was brought in a back entrance. “You are here to talk about contentious items, so contentious that my presence is controversial,” she told the group. Hochstein – by now a prominent public figure in B.C. – had an even greater ability to provoke. An RCMP officer at one point asked, “Which one of you is Phil Hochstein?” and then suggested he stay away from the windows of the hotel. The Vancouver Sun’s labour reporter, likely concerned with protecting her standing with union sources, insisted her interview with Hochstein was done at the back of a restaurant.
But the mood in the room and the success of the event weren’t tainted by the hostility outside. “You had people coming together who had no knowledge of each other and it’s like they were instant brothers,” Kushner says. “They shared a similar outlook on the world, they shared a similar view of how the construction industry should operate, they were dealing with the same issues of union intimidation.” The conference was also a good opportunity for building business relationships among contractors, and there were some union representatives who preferred to be on the inside listening rather than the outside protesting. Kushner says some of them came to the important realization that the shift to open shop wasn’t a temporary result of economic circumstances, but that “these contractors were absolutely philosophically committed to the concept of operating on a non-union basis, to taking care of their employees, to letting their employees decide whether they were union or not.”
For both Hochstein and Kushner, the success of the conference was an important professional milestone. “It had this tension in the air; it had this magic in the air,” Kushner says. “It was absolutely, when I look back, one of the highlights of my career.” Hochstein agrees: “I remember sitting with Stephen and with Bill [Stewart, of the Saskatchewan Merit association] in the back and saying ‘well, that was quite something’. And it was. There was quite the feeling in the room.”
The event became the basis for ongoing collaboration with the other open shop associations that gradually took root across Canada with the exception of Quebec – collaboration that would culminate many years later in the formation of a national umbrella organization.
Stephen Kushner
ICBA and various provincial Merit organizations continued to work together where appropriate, and in 2008, they came together to form Merit Canada. Close to a decade after the first national open shop conference had been held there, representatives of what were now eight provincial open shop associations returned to Banff to formalize this new collective entity, building on a well-established practice of informal collaboration. “We have given up on the Canadian Construction Association,” said Hochstein at the time. “Our voice wasn’t heard and they are not interested in our issues or receptive to our needs.”
“Increasingly, we were getting into newer issues, like immigration policy, ability to bring in foreign workers and so forth,” says Kushner of the motivation for Merit Canada. “But we weren’t lobbying, we weren’t a permanent presence, we weren’t an ongoing presence. You know, MPs didn’t know who we were. And we were not able to affect anything meaningfully by the infrequent interventions that we were doing.” The Building Trades, in contrast, had a well-established lobbying presence in Ottawa.
Former ICBA Chair Jim Laurence served as a founding vice-chair of Merit Canada and says its formation was one of his passions. He cites union transparency with respect to use of dues as one of the key federal priorities he was happy to see the new organization pursue. Working with the Conservative government that was in power until 2015, Merit Canada got a bill passed to address this issue. Other achievements included the elimination of a dated federal fair wage policy, a Competition Bureau investigation of union job targeting funds, and securing a secret ballot vote in federally regulated sectors.
Merit Canada worked well for more than a decade, until Kushner’s successors decided to move Merit Alberta out of the organization, rebrand, and put their focus on group benefits instead of advocacy.
However, ICBA, ICBA Alberta, and four other provincial Merits (Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia) continue to work together today on federal advocacy files under the Merit Canada umbrella. The organization remains a key voice for open shop construction and free enterprise values.
