By Jordan Bateman
Jon Coleman is an Indigenous contractor from the Cowichan Tribes, who owned his own civil construction business. A few years ago, a new hospital started going up in Cowichan, and he took the NDP Government at its word when their premier said he wanted local, Indigenous contractors to have a fair shot at the work.
Coleman tried to bid the project. But he wasn’t allowed to work on it.
Not because he wasn’t qualified. Not because his bid was too high. He was excluded because his workers didn’t carry a card from one of the 19 building trades unions the NDP government decided were the only acceptable unions in British Columbia.
“I have said repeatedly that the Community Benefits Agreement needs to be abolished… it insults us,” Coleman said. He briefly blocked site access in protest. Years later, he’s still right.
That’s the Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) in one story. The NDP takes a major public project, hands control to their friends and insiders in organized labour, and locks everyone else out – including the people whose taxes are paying for it, and precisely the type of local and Indigenous companies they claimed they wanted to make room for.
And it’s a small cabal. Less than 15 per cent of B.C.’s construction workforce belongs to a union. The other 85 per cent build hospitals, schools, roads and homes every day without one. Under a CBA, that 85 per cent gets shut out of the very public projects their tax dollars fund. A minority is handed a monopoly, and the rest of us are told to pay up and be quiet.
So the obvious question, the one a taxpayer always asks: what did we get for it?
We got the Cowichan District Hospital running roughly $560 million over its original $887 million budget. Every CBA public works project went over budget and was late, including the new Pattullo Bridge that was more than two years late and $367 million over budget. We got a think-tank report from Cardus concluding the CBA made labour shortages worse, drove up costs, and treated workers unfairly.
But in NDP-land, that’s not considered a rough patch: that’s the design working as intended.
Now the bill is coming due for everyone. This year’s provincial budget posted a record deficit north of $13 billion. To cope, Finance Minister Brenda Bailey announced she was “re-pacing” billions in capital projects – gross political spin for cancelling. Phase two of the Burnaby Hospital redevelopment, $1.7 billion: “Re-paced”. More than $1 billion in promised long-term care: “Re-paced”. Student housing: “Re-paced”. Contractors had already lined up subtrades for Burnaby – real contracts, real money – when the plug got pulled.
Why was the cupboard bare? Because CBA projects burned through the capital budget before the work was done. Pay more, wait longer, get less. Then run out of money for the next one.
Here’s the part that should sting. Look east. From 2021 to 2025, Alberta’s construction sector grew 19.4 per cent. BC’s grew 5.2 per cent. On the residential side, Alberta is up 18.9 per cent and BC is down 13.4. Alberta doesn’t run a union-only monopoly on public work. Same country, same trades, same lumber – wildly different results. That’s not bad luck. That’s policy.
And the CBA is just the most visible way the NDP tilts the field against open-shop companies. Look at WorkSafeBC. In four years, claim costs have ballooned 90 per cent – up roughly $1.5 billion – while the employer surplus that once cushioned small businesses has shrunk toward nothing. WorkSafe even scrapped the fraud-investigation unit that kept bogus claims honest. And a stack of proposed changes – broader psychological-injury definitions, chronic-pain claims with no diagnostic test, a 27-week leave nobody can quite explain, harassment rules so tangled they’re nearly impossible to follow – could pile another $2 billion onto the system.
Here’s what stings: it didn’t have to be this way. When B.C.’s construction associations got serious about workplace safety in 1992, the assessment rate for general construction was $5.83 per $100 of payroll. Three decades of evidence-based work brought it down to 64 cents – the lowest on record – and cut injury rates from 7.3 to 3.0 per 100 workers. That’s what data-driven policy delivers. Entitlement-driven policy hands you a $2-billion bill and calls it progress.
Then there’s the Labour Code. The NDP already lets a union organize your shop with no secret-ballot vote, with no chance for workers to weigh in privately or without intimidation. Now a government-appointed review panel wants to go further: a standing commission to continually meddle in construction labour relations, and looser picket rules that could let a dispute you have nothing to do with – one playing out on the far side of a fence, at a rail line or a port – shut your jobsite down cold.
Add it up. Rig the bidding through CBAs. Rig the insurance through WorkSafe. Rig the organizing through the Labour Code. Different files, same project: make it harder and costlier to run an open-shop construction company in British Columbia.
Nobody is saying unions have no place in BC construction. They do. But that place should be earned in the open market – by winning bids, not by lobbying a government to write your competitors out of the rules.
There’s a fix for at least the worst of it. In March, Conservative MLA Kiel Giddens introduced a bill to ban union-only conditions from public-sector contracts. Open, fair, merit-based procurement. Anyone qualified can bid, the best value wins, and a hospital gets built by whoever did the best work to land the project. That’s it. That’s the whole reform.
It would have let Jon Coleman bid, fair and square, for the opportunity to build a hospital in his own community.
Until that’s the law again, this isn’t a labour policy. It’s a punishment for the 85 per cent of tradespeople who don’t want to be organized the way the NDP wants them, and for every taxpayer footing the outrageous bill.
Jordan Bateman is Vice-President of Communications and Advocacy at the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association (ICBA), Canada’s largest construction association.