Month: January 2023

Last Monday night, the sports world looked on in shock and horror as 24-year-old Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed during an NFL football game. After a seemingly routine tackle, Hamlin’s heart and breathing stopped. He fell over and received life-saving medical attention, as his teammates and opponents looked on, many openly weeping. The game was cancelled, and everyone has been relieved to hear that Hamlin is now breathing on his own, speaking to teammates, and appears to be through the worst of this.

On Wednesday, Green Bay Packers superstar quarterback Aaron Rodgers was on the Pat McAfee Show and talked about the incident and what should happen next. He made some important points about men’s mental health. From The Sporting News:

“I just think you maybe have an open forum to allow guys to share their emotions,” Rodgers said. “I think as men sometimes, we’re so conditioned maybe to suppress everything, to just put on a good face and, ‘We’re going to tough through this.’ I don’t really think that’s the approach.”

He also talked about the perils of “doomscrolling” while waiting for these horrific situations to unfold. “At one point I just had to stop (refreshing Twitter) because it’s this loophole of just like depressive thoughts about him and about football mortality and about everything, the future and all that,” he said.

Rodgers’ comment is another step toward breaking the stigma around mental health, especially in male-dominated professions like sports and construction. 

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Each week, ICBA’s Jordan Bateman reflects on what we’ve learned as we participate in ICBA’s Workplace Wellness Program. ICBA’s Workplace Wellness Program is helping more than 90 companies and nearly 10,000 construction professionals better understand mental health. This program is free for all ICBA members – check out icba.ca/wellness for details.

SURREY – BC construction companies expect a year of labour shortages and historically high wage increases – all while growing in their discontent with government, according to the results of a new survey of Independent Contractors and Businesses Association (ICBA) member companies.

Four out of every five BC construction companies (80%) say they don’t have enough workers – up from last year. And 77 per cent of employers say this is their company’s single biggest challenge in 2023.

“The shortage of people is intensifying as Canada continues to go over a demographic cliff,” said ICBA President Chris Gardner, who released ICBA’s annual Wage and Benefits Survey of its member companies across B.C. today. “BC construction companies are increasing pay and benefits, adopting new technology faster than ever, and recruiting everywhere they can – but they’re still falling short of filling positions.”

Construction in B.C. now employs nearly 250,000 people and accounts for almost 10 per cent of the provincial GDP. The acute shortage of people is driving record increases in wages – ICBA members report the average trade wage (excluding benefits, bonuses and overtime) is expected to increase by 6% this year.

“For construction professionals, there has never been more opportunities or higher compensation,” said Gardner. “More than 90% of our members expect 2023 to be as busy – or busier – than 2022. There has been no better time to pursue a career in construction than today.”

The labour shortage, supply chain issues, and growing burden of red tape has resulted in record discontent with government. Only 2% of ICBA members said, “when dealing with a business like mine, government is on the right track.” More than half (55%) said government is on the wrong track.

“Rules, regulations, red tape – and the seeming inability to get projects approved and permitted quickly – are impacting affordability and driving a record-level of frustration with government,” said Gardner. “The World Bank reports that Canada ranks 64^th in the world in how long it takes to get a construction project approved and permitted – a reality that frustrates the construction industry every day and is a real threat to investment in BC and Canada.”

The ICBA Wage and Benefits Survey also noted:

• Interior: 33% of contractors expect more work in 2023 than last year; 85% say they are short of workers, up from 72% in 2022.
• North: 75% of contractors expect more work in 2023 than last year; 92% say they are short of workers, up from 71% in 2022.
• Vancouver Island: 48% of contractors expect more work in 2023 than last year; 83% say they are short of workers, steady from 84% in 2022.
• Lower Mainland: 50% of contractors expect more work in 2023 than last year; 80% say they are short of workers, up from 76% in 2022.

For results of the ICBA Wage and Benefits Survey, including several infographics that can be used by media, click HERE.

The following op-ed by ICBA President Chris Gardner first appeared in Business in Vancouver on Jan. 17, 2023.

A slam dunk business deal if there ever was one. Strategic for both Canada and Japan – investment, jobs and climate change boxes all getting giant check marks. And, supporting democracy and further isolating Russia, a country now committed to killing as many innocent Ukrainian civilians as it possibly can.

Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, representing the world’s third largest economy, met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week to ask for more Canadian liquefied natural gas so that it can end its purchase of Russian energy.

Kishida is asking Canada to lay the foundation for additional investments like that undertaken by LNG Canada, the largest private investment in Canadian history, to tap into Canada’s rich natural gas reserves and bring them to market. And LNG Canada will do this while generating emissions 35 percent lower than the best performing comparable facility in the world – Canadians can be deservedly proud.

Tokyo-based Mitsubishi Corporation owns 15 per cent of LNG Canada. When it comes online in the next year or two, LNG Canada, will replace 9 per cent of the natural gas Japan currently gets from Russia.

That’s a lot of LNG, but it leaves plenty of room for more clean Canadian energy to be sent to Asia. Our challenge is an approach by government that seems designed to do just the opposite – turn away investors, squander billions in new capital, and kill thousands of jobs.

Kishida went away empty-handed, except for a Trudeau lecture on decarbonization. “We didn’t get any concrete commitment,” he told the media.

This follows on the heels of the visit to Canada by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz last August seeking similar commitments from Canada, only to be told, not-so-subtly, at a Trudeau press conference that there is no business case for sending LNG from Canada to Europe.

Canadians taking this all in would have been surprised to read just before Christmas that the Prime Minister of Britain and the President of the United States signed an agreement that will see exports of LNG from the USA to the UK double next year. Apparently, there is a business case after all.

The pattern is clear and investors are looking at Canada as a place where it is simply too difficult to do business and to get to yes on major projects.  Statista ranks Canada #26 in the world when it comes to the quality of our infrastructure, just barely ahead of Hungary and Oman. Our ports are #24 in the world, tied with Malta and Azerbaijan. Even if the economic investment and political will could be mustered to build something, the World Bank tells us Canada ranks #64 in the world for how long it takes to approve and permit construction projects.

As the Business Council of BC notes, international exports of goods and services used to account for more than one-third of BC’s GDP, as recently as 2000. Today, it’s 23 per cent – bucking the growth trend of virtually every other advanced OECD economy. In fact, Canadian outbound investment has exceeded inbound investment every year since 2014.

The cascading effects are significant to our long-term prosperity. Underbuilt infrastructure, choking regulation, and lack of political will are key reasons why the OECD says that over the next decade, with a projected growth rate of just 1 per cent annually, Canada will have the worst performing economy among the 38 developed nations it tracks.

Such anemic growth means that it will take more than 70 years for Canada’s economy to double in size – crushing the hope that our children will be better off than we are. A t this rate of growth, it will take three generations to realize this dream.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Germany, as desperate as Japan to get itself off Russian energy, is building LNG plants and pipelines at record speed. Its first floating LNG plant was built and opened within 10 months. LNG now regularly ships from the United States to Germany.

It has changed so fast that Chancellor Scholz created the phrase Deutschland-Tempo as a model for how the country wants to tackle its energy and infrastructure issues.  “This is now the new Germany-pace at which we are bringing infrastructure projects forward,” Scholz said at the LNG plant opening.

“The LNG Acceleration Act must be a blueprint for policy. Plan, build and modernize faster,” added German finance minister Christian Lindner.

Right now, Canadian-Tempo could best be described as glacial planning, less building, and slow modernization. It is frustrating to see so much opportunity slip away.

It’s so bad that  75 per cent of the jobs added in Canada since the pandemic started have been government jobs.

It’s hard not to believe that entrepreneurs, investors, and employers feel as though they are being punished for wanting to build and invest in Canada. Canada needs to aim higher than dead last among developed economies. We have an abundance of resources, talented people, and endless opportunity: our elected officials just need to pick up the tempo.

Memories are a powerful thing, and mine are filled with happy thoughts about former Vancouver Canuck Gino Odjick. Gino was a mountain of a man, one of those classic 1990s NHL enforcers, who made a living dropping the gloves and tossing haymakers.

He was beloved in British Columbia for his big smile, for sticking up for his teammates, and – despite the violence he inflicted and suffered – for the gentle spirit we could sense within him. In the Indigenous community, the Algonquin-born Gino was especially (and rightly) revered.

Over his NHL career, Gino spent nearly 43 hours in a penalty box, much of that time for fighting. Hockeyfights.com (yes, there is a website tracking hockey fights) says he fought 127 times for the Canucks.

But it took an incredible toll. A dozen years after he retired, Gino was wracked with physical problems – and mental health issues. “When you eat headshots, it’s hard on the brain,” Gino said in 2014. He told a story that during his final season in the NHL, his concussion-induced trauma was so bad that he couldn’t find his way to his home rink.

During his health issues, Gino kept talking to kids about mental health and taking care of themselves. “I’ve lost lots of relatives to suicide. I’m happy that I asked for help and I try to share that with the kids to ask for help if they aren’t feeling well,” he told Kamloops students in June.

Gino passed away over the weekend, and Canuck fans were devastated. His spirit will live on – and I hope his commitment to breaking the stigma around mental health too. He was one-of-a-kind.

Bless you, Gino. 

Each week, ICBA’s Jordan Bateman reflects on what we’ve learned as we participate in ICBA’s Workplace Wellness Program. ICBA’s Workplace Wellness Program is helping more than 90 companies and nearly 10,000 construction professionals better understand mental health. This program is free for all ICBA members – check out icba.ca/wellness for details.

After more than a year and a half of writing weekly about mental health, looking through ICBA’s Workplace Wellness program, hanging out with Corey Hirsch at many mental health events, and talking about it constantly with the media, it’s easy to forget that stigma is still an everyday occurrence and has to be pushed back against.

It comes in our language – words like “crazy”. It comes in our frustrations – “just suck it up.” It comes in our feelings – “You’re feeling depressed? I have it way worse!” And it comes in our apathy – “Maybe I didn’t hear that right.”

But stigma is still there, and we should continue to push back against it.

So let’s keep talking openly about it, educating ourselves and others. And let’s remember to default to compassion first – these are our friends, family, colleagues, and loved ones. They deserve our support.

Each week, ICBA’s Jordan Bateman reflects on what we’ve learned as we participate in ICBA’s Workplace Wellness Program. ICBA’s Workplace Wellness Program is helping more than 90 companies and nearly 10,000 construction professionals better understand mental health. This program is free for all ICBA members – check out icba.ca/wellness for details.