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 and a memorable labour battle on Vancouver Island. 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.
Things were already tense at the Nexgen project in Port Alberni, but what happened next pushed B.C. labour relations into truly dark territory.
On Wednesday, November 23, 1994, all eyes were on the Labour Relations Board. A new ruling was coming down – one that addressed ongoing picketing by the Building Trades and a Communications, Energy and Paperworkers’ Union strike at the mill, both blocking progress on the Nexgen job.
A CEP leader warned of “extreme consequences” if the ruling didn’t go their way.
But it was Building Trades President Len Werden who really raised the temperature, promising “blood in the bloody street.”
The next day, that prediction came true.
Just before noon on November 24, a small group of fewer than ten TNL reps – accompanied by a modest police escort – arrived at the picket line. Their mission was to serve the Labour Board decision ordering the picketers to stand down and allow TNL crews and subs to get back to work. They’d been told they’d need to attempt this more than once before a court injunction would even be considered.
What was supposed to be a paperwork hand-off escalated into something far uglier.
Roughly 300 picketers were at the gate. According to reports, they “erupted into a mob, kicking, punching and screaming” at the TNL team. The delegation was “pushed, tripped and pelted with rock-filled snowballs, eggs, hot coffee and other materials.” The court orders they dropped as they fled were “stamped into the slush and mud by the crowd.”
Several people were hurt. One person’s jaw was broken. A CEP-member news cameraman was also among the injured.
“Members of the RCMP couldn’t get control once it got going,” said RCMP Sgt. Peter Montague. “All we could do was assist TNL to get out.”
Union spokespeople tried to spin the attack as some kind of setup. But the public wasn’t buying it.
“How long must it be before ‘blood in the streets’ is not touted by union leaders as an alternative to legal resolution of conflicts between labour and business?” asked a Vancouver Sun columnist. Vaughn Palmer added that “the response from the New Democrats was mainly the silence that implies consent.”
Chief Justice William Esson, commenting later from the bench, wasn’t buying the spontaneity argument either: It was “simply not credible” that the violence wasn’t premeditated. There must have been a “considerable degree of calculation.”
Even after the violence, union leaders doubled down. One week later, on November 30, the B.C. Federation of Labour held its convention in Vancouver. Some 900 people marched in protest of project owner MacMillan Bloedel.
“I’m here to tell MacMillan Bloedel that if they want to play in the kitchen, they better be ready to take the heat,” roared Fed President Ken Georgetti.
But the tide had turned.
A Supreme Court injunction was issued, allowing TNL back on site and ordering the removal of the picketers. On December 7, 31 more arrests were made – adding to the 60-plus already logged. A squad of 40 riot officers waited on standby but never had to leave their bus.
By January, 64 people were found guilty of criminal contempt of court for trying to prevent TNL workers from doing their jobs.
Tension still hung in the air. A TNL worker told ICBA Newsline in March 1995 that a feeling of tension “still happens every morning when we come to work and every evening when we leave for home, but not as bad – you kind of get used to it.”
Eventually, accountability came.
In 1997, TNL settled with the Building Trades Council for $1.5 million in damages. More importantly, they got a commitment: union interference in their business would stop. “An acknowledgement that they would never try doing this again,” said Jim Greatbanks.
In 1999, two TNL supervisors won $340,000 in personal damages for the harassment they endured.
Still, Greatbanks doesn’t sugarcoat it. Nexgen was brutal. “Companies that teetered, you know, that were kind of maybe in the union camp and maybe not, they wanted nothing to do with us,” he admitted.
But even in the darkest moments, the ICBA community rallied. Greatbanks remembers one unsolicited cheque for $10,000. “We’d like to help you, we know you’re going through hell,” the note read. That money – sent by a fellow ICBA member – helped offset legal fees and unexpected costs.
Whatever toll it took, the outcome was undeniable: Port Alberni shattered the final barrier to open shop involvement in B.C.’s industrial construction market.
MacMillan Bloedel’s VP of Engineering, writing to another major client in 1995, put it plainly: “Our experience with our Nexgen project and elsewhere has firmly convinced us that open shop is the fairest, most productive, and most competitive way to manage our contracted business.”
Greatbanks simply called it what it was: “It was a watershed moment… that quite a lot of things subsequent to this got built non-union that probably wouldn’t have.”
