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 wind the clock back to 1973, two years before ICBA was formed…
It was an NDP cabinet minister who suggested British Columbia needed a province-wide open shop construction association.
You read that right: an NDP cabinet minister. And a union card holding one at that.
Bill King
Bill King was a former railroad worker who had been active in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and was involved in Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (the predecessor to the NDP) politics since his teenage years.
King was MLA for Shuswap-Revelstoke throughout the 1970s and served as Minister of Labour in Dave Barrett’s NDP government. He even led the NDP opposition in 1976 when Dave Barrett briefly lost a seat in the Legislature.
The story of King’s contribution to ICBA’s formation begins in 1973, when a group of local contractors got together in the basement of the Crown Point Hotel in Trail to discuss the NDP’s new Public Works Fair Employment Act, which required that all public works go to contractors with a building trades collective agreement.
“That was the first time that all of us realized that we could not tender any government job,” says Elmer Verigin, the ICBA life member who helped pull the meeting together. “There was about 70 of us got together in Trail and we said, ‘well, what are we going to do about this?’.”
Their answer was to send a delegation to Victoria to meet with Minister King. In addition to Verigin, it included Norman Husband, Gordon Laarz, Joe Pagurut and Nick Plotnikoff. Most of them had never been across on the ferry to Vancouver Island before, Verigin says, and they had trouble finding the minister’s office.
Elmer and Marilyn Verigin
But once inside, they got a serious hearing. Verigin recounts the story: “We said there’s a hundred and ten thousand tradespeople in the province that are certified by the government of British Columbia, and 33,000 belong to unions – and so 77,000 that we employ don’t have any chance to bid on government work. Do you think that’s fair? He says, ‘hell no, that’s not fair at all. But who the hell are you guys?’.” The size of the open shop sector was a revelation to the Labour Minister, who told the delegation they needed to get organized.
That message was delivered over a two-and-a-half hour discussion, much to the surprise of reporters who were waiting when it ended. “We expected you guys to be kicked out of there in 15 minutes,” Verigin recalls them saying. “[The minister] was impressed by our simplicity. We didn’t have suits. We certainly weren’t cultured in our discussion. We were just dealing here with a very specific thing.”
Members of the Vancouver Island Right to Work Association (VIRTWA) – who the Kootenay contractors connected with while in Victoria – were equally surprised by the hearing the minister had given them. This group had been formed in 1971, and while it had struggled to maintain consistent momentum, it was an important precursor to ICBA.
“We, in Victoria, are proud to say that the initial spark for the ICBA came from us,” the ICBA’s first directory records. It goes on to say that, after the VIRTWA’s formation, “Victoria union locals began to realize that picking on a united group of independent non-union contractors was quite different from their previous harassments on single, defenceless companies.”
Jim Hartshorne
Jim Hartshorne was a VIRTWA executive member, and he and his employees had suffered that harassment as he expanded into multi-unit residential work.
“It was a war I fought every single day,” he said. Workers, he recalled, would be pressured to sign union cards with the threat of being shut out after certification was in place. “These guys were just employees, for goodness’ sake, they’re just trying to bring a cheque home and look after the kids.”
The VIRTWA, he said, was instrumental in helping to lessen some of those pressures. “Everything we tried to do was to improve our lot as developers, builders and employees,” Hartshorne said, “and then slowly we got involved with these other groups.” In 1975, VIRTWA became known as the Vancouver Island Independent Contractors and Businessmen Association, a name it would bequeath to the province-wide association it was about to become part of.
Bill King had no idea what he had unleashed on B.C. construction and politics.
A few updates on the people mentioned here:
- Bill King passed away in 2020. Much was shared about his NDP political career and community service, but his role in sparking ICBA wasn’t mentioned.
- Jim Hartshorne owns both the Victoria Shamrocks WLA franchise and the Victoria Grizzlies BCHL team. The Shamrocks’ were the beloved favourite team of the late NDP Premier John Horgan.
- Elmer Verigin is often in touch with us at ICBA, and is a beloved life member of the association. He shares his memories on his blog.
- Nick Plotnikoff passed away in 2016. Elmer wrote: “Nick never lost contact with his Doukhobor roots. Those principles of his faith became part of his actions. Then there was the humorous side of Nick. He was part of a duet with another Creston Contractor, in their interpretation of Huey and Louey, Donald Duck’s nephews. No matter how disparaging a situation would be, a ‘break’ would entail these two in a discussion in ‘duck language’. Those of you who have not experienced this act have missed perhaps the best entertainment that even Red Skelton couldn’t duplicate.”
