Next provincial government should fix agreement that “ignores best practices”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 12, 2024

British Columbia’s Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) has worsened labour shortages, caused cost overruns, and is deeply unfair to the province’s workers, according to a new report from Cardus, a non-partisan think tank.

The report, Benefits for Whom? Assessing British Columbia’s Community Benefits Agreement, notes that British Columbia’s CBA only allows contracts for certain government-funded infrastructure projects to go to companies if their employees become members of one of 19 favoured labour unions. This means that companies whose workers exercise their constitutional right to select another union (or none at all) are blocked from working on the projects their taxes pay for.

“When the provincial government blocks some companies from working on construction projects simply because their employees don’t sign the right union card, it’s not just deeply unfair to workers – it’s also bad for taxpayers,” says report author Renze Nauta, Work & Economics Program Director at Cardus. “The CBA discourages construction companies from bidding on government infrastructure projects, which drives up costs, just as we’ve seen in the replacement project for the Cowichan District Hospital.”

The Cowichan District Hospital Replacement is a good example of a CBA project gone wrong. It has already gone almost $560 million over-budget – the largest cost overrun in dollar terms among large Infrastructure BC projects. By blocking some companies from working on the project, the CBA meant fewer workers were available to build the new hospital, making an already difficult labour shortage even worse. The CBA was also responsible for discrimination against Indigenous contractor Jon Coleman, initially blocking his company from working on the project simply because his workers weren’t represented by one of the unions favoured by the provincial government.

The CBA also means that a provincial Crown corporation becomes the employer of almost all workers on CBA-related projects, displacing contractors from their roles as employers.

“British Columbia’s CBA ignores best practices for such agreements,” says Nauta. “Whoever forms the next provincial government needs to fix the CBA so that it actually works in the province’s interest instead of against it.”

Benefits for Whom? Assessing British Columbia’s Community Benefits Agreement makes three recommendations for how to fix the province’s CBA:

• Respect the rights of all workers to affiliate with unions as they wish
• Respect the role of contractors as employers
• Truly expand opportunities for under-represented groups, including Indigenous British Columbians

Benefits for Whom? Assessing British Columbia’s Community Benefits Agreement is freely available online.

-30-

MEDIA INQUIRIES
Daniel Proussalidis
Cardus – Director of Communications
613-899-5174
media@cardus.ca

Cardus – Imagination toward a thriving society
Cardus is a non-partisan think tank dedicated to clarifying and strengthening, through research and dialogue, the ways in which society’s institutions can work together for the common good.