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 1997, when NDP Premier Glen Clark tried to essentially unionize all of B.C. construction.
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 early July 1997, the NDP government, led by former union organizer Glen Clark, was on the back foot when it came to Bill 44 and Clark’s effort to create sectoral bargaining across B.C. construction.
On July 9, Clark’s deputy Doug McArthur met with the Coalition of B.C. Businesses, of which ICBA was a driving force. It was a fishing expedition – an attempt to find cracks in the opposition. He found none. In a letter afterward, Coalition Chair Suromitra Sanatani reiterated: “We remain 100 per cent opposed to sectoral certification in any form. Your government has chosen to select B.C.’s construction industry as the first target… Which sectors could be next on the firing line are now anybody’s guess.”
The Coalition didn’t propose amendments. They wanted the whole thing scrapped.
Tensions rose. A business legislature lawn protest was a week away. “It was a little bit of brinkmanship,” admitted Marcia Smith, another key Coalition leader, “because government was clearly unhappy at the thought that business would protest on the lawns of Legislature. When you’re trying to attract investment and create jobs in a province you don’t want to see the entire business community out there protesting and with such an iconic backdrop as your Legislature.”
But there was anxiety on both sides. “I remember us freaking out and panicking about how many people were actually going to show up,” Smith says. “It’s one thing to organize a rally in downtown Vancouver when everyone has to walk out of their office doors and go down the street, it’s a whole other thing to think that they were going to get on buses and go to Victoria for the day to do this.” She remembers quiet relief around the Coalition table when the truce was struck and the protest became unnecessary. “It might not have been as spectacular as we were threatening.”
“Government didn’t want to see the entire business community protesting with the Legislature as the backdrop.” But there was nervousness too. “We were freaking out about how many people would actually show up,” she said. “Quiet relief” followed when the government blinked and offered a deal: cancel the protest, and Bill 44 would be withdrawn.
For a government that rarely backed down, withdrawing Bill 44 was a stunning reversal. Even Clark admitted the rollout had been bungled. “We should have talked to people more before we brought the legislation in.” Minister Cashore was even more direct: “I did not manage the launch of this bill well.”
ICBA President Philip Hochstein called it a political calculation: “The outcry wasn’t worth it.” The Vancouver Sun’s Vaughn Palmer called it “a staggering and significant about-face. I think Clark was concerned that if he’d gone ahead with some of that stuff that there would have been a fairly obvious backlash in terms of investment in the province.”
But the NDP wasn’t done. In 1998, they tried again – this time with a scaled-down version: Bill 26, which imposed sectoral bargaining in just the industrial, commercial, and institutional (ICI) sub-sector of construction.
Victoria Times Colonist legislative columnist Les Leyne characterized it this way: “It’s a pale, insipid version of last year’s Bill 44, but it can still do a lot of damage.”
ICBA and the Coalition once again rallied. Demonstrations were held at Canada Place in Vancouver and at the legislature in Victoria. Construction vehicles circled the buildings. Suited business leaders marched with placards. “Business doesn’t usually do rallies,” Sanatani said. “The B.C. Federation of Labour is way better at that.”
“I don’t believe that in the history of the Business Council anybody had had to get up and yell through the blowhorn on the streets of Vancouver before,” says Smith. In the end, she believes participants had fun with it and also made an impression.
“It was such an unusual thing for the business community to do, to see all sorts of business people on the streets,” says Smith. “They were out there with their suit jackets off, and I remember my colleague in her high heels and her really great skirt talking to the police. And that was a strange sight to see, businesspeople protesting on the streets.”
Despite the effort, Bill 26 passed.
But it didn’t work. “Passing a law and making it a reality are often two different things,” ICBA noted in a 1999 member update on the bitter infighting among unionized contractor groups that followed enactment of Bill 26.
The Building Trades never secured a single collective agreement under the new system. The model collapsed under its own contradictions. When the BC Liberals took office in 2001, Bill 26’s provisions were quietly repealed.
ICBA continued to push back on other NDP measures, including the punitive Bill 58 in 1999, which suspended pension benefits for union members who took non-union work.
But time was running out. Glen Clark’s tenure collapsed in scandal, and even within ICBA, the mood began to shift. “Even if they win this one it isn’t going to last long. We’re going to win the next election,” Nauss said at the time. What had once felt like battling a political Goliath now felt like swatting at a government in free fall.
The era of NDP dominance was ending. And ICBA was ready for what came next.
