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 turn back the clock to the early 1990s, and ICBA’s work with the Coalition of B.C. Businesses.
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.
By mid-1992, it was obvious: small and mid-sized businesses weren’t being heard.
The B.C. Business Council – then representing mostly large, already-unionized employers – was quietly floating a tradeoff: they’d accept scrapping secret ballot union votes in exchange for preserving picketing restrictions. That might have worked for big corporations with collective agreements in place. But for the still largely non-union small business community, it was a disaster in the making.
“Labour law affects those who operate without a collective agreement as much as those who operate with one,” Philip Hochstein reminded the Business Council.
Out of that frustration, the Coalition of B.C. Businesses was born in July. The idea came from Bob Plecas, a former senior Socred government official who had joined ICBA as an advisor after being pushed out by the NDP. As Hochstein remembers it: “You can’t do it on your own, you need an arm – let’s go build the arm.”
The Coalition grew fast, focusing exclusively on labour and employment standards. That focus allowed it to carve out a powerful niche without stepping on the toes of its member groups. ICBA didn’t need the spotlight. As Hochstein put it: “Get other people more important than me excited about my issue and then get out of the way and let them carry the message.”
When the NDP tabled Bill 84 that October, the business community braced for impact.
There was one win: the bill didn’t include sectoral bargaining – a tool specifically designed to force small businesses under pre-negotiated, one-size-fits-all union contracts. But the rest of it? Ugly. Bill 84 eliminated secret ballot certification votes and tilted the field even further toward top-down union organizing. For the many non-union members of the Coalition, this was a direct threat.
The Coalition went public – radio spots, community newspaper ads, and a clear message: the bill was “unfair, unbalanced and unrealistic.” And it resonated. “The Coalition had the benefit of taking positions that were generally seen by the public as fair and reasonable,” said Geoffrey Howes, giving them the edge over more transparently self-interested union messaging.
Big business, by contrast, stayed quiet – leading some to suggest Bill 84 was a reasonable compromise. But Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer saw through it: “Most everything labour found offensive about Bill 19 [the Socred reforms of 1987] is stripped of its impact or banished altogether. With these amended rules, employers will find themselves back in a day when it was harder to prevent workers from organizing…”
And it wasn’t the end of the story. NDP Labour Minister Moe Sihota admitted sectoral bargaining wasn’t off the table – just not being introduced “at this time.” B.C. Federation of Labour President Ken Georgetti called Bill 84 “a labour code we can build on.” Coalition Chair Kathy Sanderson saw it differently: the bill was “a wide swing of the pendulum,” and small business was being asked “to engage in a leap of faith.”
But the leap never quite landed for the Building Trades. Even with the new rules, open shop contractors were offering steadier work and better compensation. And when the NDP came back later in their mandate to push the Labour Code even further, the Coalition was ready.
“That was the powerful thing with the Coalition,” said Suromitra Sanatani, who would later become its chair. “All of a sudden you had small business speaking with one voice.”
