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 look at ICBA’s incredible group health, dental and retirement benefits program, and our award-winning ICBA Wellness.
In the long history of ICBA, few developments have had as profound an impact on the lives of construction professionals and their families as the evolution of our benefits business and, more recently, our industry‑leading wellness program. These efforts didn’t begin as flashy initiatives. They began with a sober understanding of what construction workers face – instability, long hours, physical risk, and, too often, personal hardship carried silently.
Chris Gardner knew that reality long before he ever imagined leading ICBA. His father died by suicide when Chris was just a boy, in an era when there was nowhere to turn and no language for help. A tragedy like that never stops shaping a person. Decades later, when Chris helped launch ICBA’s mental‑health and wellness program, he told his father’s story publicly for the first time. It set the tone for how ICBA would approach wellness: directly, honestly, and with a level of empathy that matched the weight of the issue.
That personal experience intersected with the story of Corey Hirsch, who joined ICBA as Wellness Ambassador. Corey’s own loss – the suicide of his girlfriend in 2018 – and his raw candour about his struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder and mental health opened doors across the province. Their shared commitment to ending stigma turned into a province‑wide speaking tour, packed rooms in construction shops and boardrooms, and now a national conversation. Their message cut through the traditional stoicism of male‑dominated industries: that too many men are suffering, and too many families are being left to carry the grief.
Even before wellness became a core part of ICBA’s identity, the association was steadily building another pillar of worker support: benefits. Early in ICBA’s history, contractors needed something that traditional insurers weren’t built to deliver. Construction hours weren’t predictable. Crew sizes changed job to job. Seasonal swings were dramatic. A conventional benefits model – built for nine‑to‑five office work – simply didn’t fit.
The breakthrough came with the Construction Industry’s Benefit Plan, better known as the Hour Bank Plan. Instead of tying coverage to a salary, the Hour Bank tied it to hours worked. It created stability where there previously had been none. Workers built up banked hours that carried them through slow patches or project transitions. Employers gained predictable costs. And ICBA gained the foundation for a robust benefit service that addressed construction as it actually is – dynamic, seasonal, and mobile.
Demand grew quickly. By 2006, the Hour Bank had recorded more than 10 million hours and became a major financial and operational pillar for ICBA. That year, ICBA purchased an insurance brokerage, bringing benefits in‑house and allowing the association to build a fully integrated benefits service. That decision proved transformative. Having direct control over the plan meant ICBA could customize benefits to the realities of open shop contractors and their workers rather than forcing them into rigid, corporate-style boxes.
Today, ICBA Benefits serves more than 300,000 Canadians – making it one of the largest independent providers of health, dental, retirement, and extended benefits in western Canada. The Hour Bank remains at the heart of the plan, but ICBA has added a wide range of options: health and dental plans, long-term disability, critical illness coverage, employer-funded Health Reimbursement Plans, and a suite of retirement and savings tools including comprehensive RRSP offerings. These retirement plans give workers portability and security – essential in a sector where project-based employment is the norm.
One of the unique strengths of ICBA Benefits has been its ability to support not just ICBA members, but the broader industry through partnerships with other associations. The Canadian Home Builders’ Association, the Truck Loggers Association, the Mechanical Contractors Association of BC, the BC Road Builders and Heavy Construction Association, and other industry organizations have entrusted ICBA to provide benefits to their members. These partnerships expand access to high‑quality plans that many smaller associations or companies couldn’t deliver on their own – reinforcing ICBA’s long-standing role as a hub for services that strengthen the construction ecosystem as a whole.
As the benefits business grew, ICBA began to see something troubling in the data: mental‑health‑related claims were rising sharply, and Employee Assistance Program usage was climbing year after year. That trend mirrored what contractors and workers were telling us – that the pressures of the industry, combined with the pandemic, addiction challenges, financial stress, and isolation, were taking a profound toll.
This brought the story back to Chris’s childhood and Corey’s loss – and toward creating something the industry had never seen before. ICBA Wellness was launched with an aim far broader than basic counselling referrals. It was built to reshape the culture of construction from the inside out. Toolbox talks on mental health became normal. Site posters and resources appeared where they had never been. Supervisors were given practical tools for recognizing warning signs. Workers saw respected advocates stand in front of them and talk openly about struggle, therapy, survival, and hope. More than 8,000 workers have gone through the program in its early years, and participation has continued to grow.
The work earned ICBA recognition: Chris Gardner received the prestigious 2022 Ragan Wellness Award for Wellness Executive of the Year, shortly after the program’s launch, affirming both the urgency of the initiative and the industry’s hunger for change. But the real measure of success is quieter – conversations happening in lunchrooms and on worksites that never would have happened a decade ago, workers asking for help rather than hiding their pain, and companies treating mental health as a core component of safety rather than a private matter to be buried.
Looking back over 50 years, ICBA’s work on benefits and wellness stands as one of its most important legacies. Advocacy wins shape policy. Training builds skills. But benefits and wellness shape lives directly, offering workers and their families stability, security, and support in moments when they need it most.
The story of ICBA’s first half-century is a story of building – not only the projects that define our skylines and infrastructure, but the systems that allow people to thrive in an industry that demands so much of them. As ICBA enters its next 50 years, the foundation built by the Hour Bank, by comprehensive benefits, by RRSP savings, and by a nationally recognized wellness initiative gives the construction sector something rare: a support structure as resilient as the people it serves.