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 begin our look at the 1990s, an era so badly mismanaged by four NDP premiers that it was dubbed “The Dismal Decade.”
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.
“Not again on this damn helicopter – we’re not going to get anywhere.”
It wasn’t a lack of will. ICBA members are the definition of entrepreneurial grit. But as Axel Gringmuth – an ICBA chair in the 1990s – remembers it, that sinking feeling became routine. He and Philip Hochstein were constantly boarding Helijet flights to Victoria to meet with the NDP government, and time after time, it felt like running into a brick wall.
“These were necessary but not very productive interactions,” Gringmuth recalled. The NDP wasn’t interested in listening. For the better part of a decade, they were openly hostile to the open shop construction sector and made no secret of it.
When the NDP won just the second mandate in its history on October 17, 1991, it marked a major political realignment in B.C. The NDP’s vote share barely changed, but the Socreds collapsed, and the Liberals, led by Gordon Wilson, jumped into official opposition. Rita Johnston, who had just taken over from the scandal-prone Bill Vander Zalm, became the last Socred premier.
Mike Harcourt, the former Vancouver mayor, took the helm for the NDP. His platform struck a moderate tone: an “open and balanced” government that would “work with all British Columbians to encourage initiative and share the opportunities and rewards,” “put an end to secret deals and special favours for political friends,” and even implement “an open tendering process for public contracts.” He also promised to “work with business, management and labour to develop balanced and fair labour legislation.”
Those words didn’t last. Harcourt was just the first of four NDP premiers in the decade. And instead of ignoring those principles, his government flipped them completely on their head.
The NDP wasted no time tilting the playing field toward their Building Trades union allies. They rewrote the Labour Code, triggering alarms in small- and medium-sized businesses across B.C. They tried to stifle the competitive edge of open shop contractors: first by dictating wage rates, then by forcing winning bidders to sign a master collective agreement and hire through union hiring halls. They even made a run at sectoral bargaining across entire chunks of the construction industry.
And yet, they still couldn’t stop the shift underway in construction. The open shop model was already proving its worth – leaner, more efficient, and more responsive. Even with the headwinds, construction values climbed in the early ’90s.
But broader economic growth? That was another story.
Under the NDP, B.C. stumbled through what became known as the “dismal decade.” The phrase “stay alive till ’95” became “make it to the millennium” after the NDP’s second win in 1996. We had the highest unemployment rate in Western Canada. Housing starts lagged. People were leaving the province. And the government added 400 new regulations a year like it was some sort of twisted badge of honour.
In response, ICBA kicked into overdrive. Board meetings that once wrapped in an hour suddenly needed three. Advocacy ramped up. ICBA became a sharp, unrelenting voice for fairness, worker choice, and taxpayer value. And others took notice. As lawyer Peter Gall later put it, ICBA became “not only the voice but the backbone of the industry.”
We found allies. We pushed back hard. And while the decade was punishing for open shop contractors and entrepreneurs across B.C., it also lit the fire that transformed ICBA into one of B.C.’s most influential public policy organizations.
It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t fast. But it was absolutely worth it.
