FLETCHER: Bridges at heart of BC’s fight against US big labour

Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.VICTORIA — Weary commuters in Metro Vancouver are seeing a light at the end of the costly political battle over the Massey Tunnel, an old, clogged four-lane passage under the Fraser River that remains the worst traffic bottleneck in BC.Premier-elect Lorne Doerkson has made it clear that the transportation ministry is going to pick up the pieces of the NDP’s failed experiment to sink a bigger tunnel — with bike lanes — into the mud of the Fraser delta. The BC Conservatives are going back to the 10-lane bridge that was under construction when the NDP took power in 2017.Last week I described the modern ties between the NDP and unions that will have to be untangled now that their latest disastrous run has been terminated. Few will recall the full extent of union support for the BC NDP, which reached a peak in the 2017 election when the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers and its BC locals gave them the biggest political donation in BC’s history.The $650,000 boost included an unprecedented move, where the union put the NDP’s senior election team directly on its payroll. John Horgan’s NDP ended a 16-year term of the BC Liberals as essentially a subsidiary of the Steelworkers, which in BC had taken over the woodworkers in a place that makes no steel.BC’s resistance to big American union power started in the 1980s, with a bridge. The Alex Fraser Bridge, another Fraser crossing named after the Cariboo MLA and highways minister who preceded Doerkson, was built by a new consortium of non-union Kerkhoff Construction of Chilliwack and Hyundai Corp. of Korea.This bridge, built for Expo 86, broke the monopoly of international unions on heavy construction. Social Credit premier Bill Bennett put a stop to the featherbedding union “craft lines,” where carpenters and ironworkers had to down tools and wait for a labourer to arrive and run a concrete vibrator for five minutes.The Alex Fraser Bridge serves well today, the first of a series of cable-stayed bridges built in the Korean engineering style that has become standard around the world. It was followed by the SkyTrain bridge to Surrey, then the world’s longest transit-only cable-stayed bridge, and the 10-lane Port Mann Bridge on Highway 1 that will now be duplicated at the Massey crossing.About $100 million had been spent on the Massey bridge when Horgan’s NDP cancelled it and called for a new tunnel in the same location. That plan was a shambles before David Eby’s government fell, his last action being to fire the main contractor, Acciona, a European engineering firm that has managed minor projects like the Chunnel connecting the UK and France..Acciona’s plan was too expensive, so they were out, and no replacement was in sight. The proposed new Massey tunnel still had no federal environmental permit to dredge and sink tunnel sections into Canada’s most prolific salmon river.The Site C dam on the Peace River was the first big hydro project to be built as an “open-shop” site, against the wishes of the US-dominated BC Building Trades. Horgan tried to sabotage that by changing labour rules to allow annual union “raids” on the Christian Labour Association of Canada and other unaffiliated unions, but his BC Green coalition partner vetoed that to avoid the cost and chaos it would have created.Today, Doerkson and the BC Conservatives have to untangle the NDP’s so-called “community benefits agreements,” where 19 mostly US unions have a monopoly on major public works. The NDP set up a new Crown corporation to manage these schemes, and gave unions greater control over apprenticeship programs.This system produced one new bridge, another Fraser crossing replacing the old one named after former premier Duff Pattullo, connecting New Westminster and Surrey. An old four-lane bridge was replaced with a new four-lane bridge — with bike lanes.The new bridge opened this year, two years late and $367 million over budget. Its name is stal̕əw̓asəm, which means “river view” in the European-created written language that almost no one, including members of the Coast Salish indigenous communities, would know how to read.Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.tomfletcherbc@gmail.comX: @tomfletcherbc

FLETCHER: Bridges at heart of BC’s fight against US big labour

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