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 2000s, and a watershed election.
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.
“I was never dressed down so severely as the first time I met Philip Hochstein,” Gordon Campbell admits. It was the late 1980s, and Campbell was still Mayor of Vancouver, under fire from Hochstein over the city’s involvement with union-backed VLC Properties. Not the smoothest start. But no hard feelings were held. The two would go on to build a strong relationship – one that left Hochstein nothing short of thrilled when Campbell became Premier in May 2001.
2001: The New Era
The NDP’s grip on power was already slipping. By the late ’90s, years of labour bias, economic blunders, and scandal had taken their toll. There were the fast ferries – “monuments to a decade of incompetence and waste,” as CBC put it – the infamous “fudge-it budget,” and then the image that stuck: police raiding Premier Glen Clark’s home live on TV in March 1999. Clark resigned a few months later, though he was later acquitted.
Ujjal Dosanjh inherited a government in freefall. He tried to steady the ship, but the 2001 election wasn’t close. Knowing what was coming, he warned voters they might wipe out the opposition entirely. “Heading to a slaughter,” he later called it. In the end, just two NDP MLAs were elected—too few even for official party status. The B.C. Liberals, led by Campbell, had won in a landslide.
After the Socreds collapsed in the early 1990s, ICBA saw the writing on the wall and moved quickly to support the B.C. Liberals as the new standard-bearer for the free enterprise coalition. The relationship deepened through the 1996 election and solidified over the next five years – politically, financially, and through third-party advertising.
The bond was more than transactional – it was built on guts. “You reminded other business organizations of what they claimed to be for,” Campbell told ICBA when he was inducted as a life member in 2017. His successor, Premier Christy Clark, was even more blunt: “Phil Hochstein and ICBA was the only person and the only business organization that had the guts to stand up and fight the NDP from outside the Legislature for the entire time.”
When the Liberals released their “New Era” platform, it was clear ICBA had been heard. Twenty-one 90-day commitments. More than a quarter aimed directly at fixing what was broken for open shop contractors: secret ballot votes restored, sectoral bargaining outlawed, union-only tendering scrapped, Highway Constructors Ltd. axed, fixed-wage laws repealed, and union pension penalties on working retirees ended.
Kurt Krampl, ICBA Chair in 2010–11, says the relationship was something special. “Philosophically, Phil and Gordon were well-aligned. So you had that perfect storm of Campbell looking for partners, us being willing partners and willing to stand up for what the Liberals were doing, and it cemented a really tight relationship with government that probably will never be repeated. It was just the perfect scenario.”
Even with that alignment, ICBA still pushed back when it needed to – especially early in the Liberals’ second term, when the government’s hunger for deregulation seemed to fade. But the working relationship remained strong, built on mutual respect and a shared understanding of what was at stake. Looking back, Campbell said the construction industry had long lacked a consistent voice – until ICBA stepped in. “ICBA had influence by virtue of being principled,” he said. “And a unique ability and willingness to call BS when something was wrong or harmful.”
Once the NDP was gone, things shifted fast. “The [business] climate was super positive and there was just a ton of work going on,” said Bob Fairbank, ICBA Chair in 2008–09. From 2001 to 2006, construction surged. Even the 2008 credit crunch didn’t knock the sector off its stride for long. By 2012, more cranes dotted the skyline than ever before, and construction jobs were back above their pre-crisis peak.
The days of union-only bidding were done. Open shop contractors were building everything: Olympic venues, the Canada Line, the Port Mann Bridge, towers, highways, and major resource projects. They weren’t just in the mix – they were leading it.
And ICBA was growing too – bigger, bolder, and more sophisticated. It played a central role in overhauling the province’s trades training system. It expanded member services. And it became more than just a voice for open shop builders. It became a serious force in shaping public policy across the board.
