Category — Business in Vancouver column

Despite nine years of unremitting hostility from the BC Liberals, the province’s construction unions are again making their presence felt.

Buoyed by the continuing need for skilled workers who can complete complex tasks on time, without compromising quality, a new coalition of building trades unions is finding allies in the private sector for project labour agreements. These agreements would see multi-billion dollar projects built entirely union.

It’s a return to an old labour relations arrangement that the Liberals have done their best to stamp out.

In this column for Business in Vancouver (Aug. 24 – 30 edition) I outlined how this trend played out in the debate over Metro Vancouver’s solid waste management plans: [Read more →]

It seemed hard to believe: a panel discussion featuring the top leaders of the IMF and the WTO with the world’s labour leaders, here in Vancouver, and not a word in the media.

Yet it happened in June, unremarked by anyone other than the redoubtable Tyee.ca. Here’s my summary, published in the Aug 3 -9 issue of Business in Vancouver: [Read more →]

When the BC Utilities Commission ruled earlier this year that Terasen could walk away from its longstanding billing service agreement with Accenture, it was another nail in the coffin of the BC Liberals’ privatization plans for BC Hydro.
With BC Transmission Corp. now being reintegrated into BC Hydro and the BCUC once again shouldered aside to allow cabinet-level decision-making on energy policy, we’re pretty much back to 2001, with the exception of our new, “green” run-of-the-river independent power producers who now seem unlikely to be able to sell into California, which was always the goal.
In a recent Business in Vancouver column (June 25 – July 8 issue) I wrote about the union that has been at the centre of these developments: [Read more →]

On a completely different note, my latest column in Business in Vancouver, reflecting labour’s concern that Ottawa’s focus on “financial literacy” is obscuring the real key to retirement security for Canadian seniors: a stronger Canadian Pension Plan.