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 mid 1990s, when the NDP forced Vancouver Island highway work to their trades union supporters – and went over budget. This is Part 2 of 2.
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.
Scott Jacob saw it coming. He’d sensed something like HCL could emerge. But even so, he was floored when it actually happened.
“In the early hours after the HCL agreement was announced, it looked a whole lot like we [as an open shop contractor] were going to go from being front of the parade to a non-player in the Island Highway Project,” he recalls. But Jacob was determined not to get sidelined. “It was awkward, it was troubling, it was not good for the taxpayer. But it was a game – it was simply the same roadbuilding game with a different set of rules. That’s how I chose to see it. It was an expensive way to work, but if you built that into your bid, you could manage your way through.”
Scott Jacob
It was his first experience with the tangle of jurisdictional rules that come with craft union agreements. A crane truck – typically a one-person job – could now require a teamster, an operating engineer, and a labourer. There was some practical wiggle room though, because HCL simply didn’t have the capacity to dispatch workers quickly. “They didn’t have the ability, the appetite or the hustle to get you what you needed when you needed it, even though they had an obligation to do so,” Jacob says.
Crew composition was another hurdle. HCL’s name-hire rules only allowed JJM Construction to place a small handful of its own employees on 20- to 50-person crews. Trusting million-dollar equipment to strangers from a hiring hall – people supervisors were sometimes meeting ten minutes before a shift – was a major concern. Jacob found some workarounds. Short-term or specialized jobs allowed more flexibility. And they strategically used the few employees they were allowed to bring in to help steady operations.
“But if any of this sounds like I enjoyed the HCL experience – I did not,” he says. “I’m simply saying I found a way to work through it.”
Then there was the master collective agreement’s broken pay scale. It inflated wages for low-skilled work and capped earnings for higher-skilled operators. “You had people that had ridiculously elevated earnings for a short period of time, but guess what? Within days, weeks, months of HCL being done, they went back to being a $13-an-hour flagger. The only difference is they now had to sell their pickup truck or their ski boat.”
The discrepancies in pay – HCL jobs vs. regular company jobs – along with mandatory union dues, led to some employee turnover. But it didn’t lead to union certification. “I think [our employees] quickly realized they didn’t need a union to help them build a positive, productive, caring relationship with JJM as an employer,” Jacob says. “The union did nothing but get in the way of that.”
ICBA kept tracking HCL and its impacts the entire time it operated. In 1997, ICBA flagged a particularly troubling detail: as much as $9.6 million in pension contributions made by HCL to union plans would likely never be paid out to the very workers they were made for.
“This was a terrible thing,” said then-ICBA President Philip Hochstein. “These were union pension funds and this arrangement helped prop them up because you had a lot of contributors who weren’t going to become beneficiaries.”
Many HCL workers – between 45% and 75% of them – wouldn’t rack up enough hours to qualify for a pension. Some even had to suspend or leave other retirement plans to take part in the Island Highway project. The agreement also locked out unions like the IWA and workers who lived more than 100 km from the job site.
Dan Doyle
Despite the model’s clear flaws, the NDP doubled down – expanding HCL’s reach to all provincially funded highway projects valued over $30,000. By the time it was finally shut down in August 2001, HCL was handling everything from Lower Mainland bridge improvements to transit expansions across the province.
There was no farewell tour. And no one close to it misses it.
“[HCL] didn’t make the world a better place as they professed it would,” says Jacob. “I would be willing to bet that, from the beginning of HCL to the end, there were no more women in construction in a meaningful way, there were no more Indigenous people in construction, and there were no more people with disabilities in construction. Just a miserable fail, at massive taxpayer expense and inconvenience to contractors.”
Dan Doyle stayed opposed to HCL the entire time. He even declined a late-term NDP invitation to sit on its board, despite the professional risk. When the BC Liberals took office in 2001, Doyle finally got the chance to share the critique he’d “kept in his bottom drawer.”
Ironically, Doyle ended up running HCL – but with one job: to shut it down. And as the Journal of Commerce put it, there was “no requiem for HCL.” The Ministry of Transportation didn’t even issue a press release.
Scott Jacob later founded Jacob Bros Construction and became ICBA Board chairman from 2022-2024.
