Following the smash success of our 2017 event with NFL legend Peyton Manning, we continue our ICBA Quarterback Series at our AGM Gala Dinner Nov. 20 with special guest, NFL legend Brett Favre.

Tickets on sale now at www.icba.ca/agm

Brett is a three-time NFL MVP, a first ballot Hall of Famer, and a Super Bowl champion. Known as football’s “Iron Man,” Brett started every game for more than 18 seasons, a league record. Thanks to his story of perseverance, leadership, courage and risk-taking, “The Gunslinger” has earned a permanent place in NFL history.

Construction employs 250,000 men and women in B.C. and contributes 10% of our provincial economy. Join us Nov. 20 as we celebrate our incredible industry.

This event supports ICBA’s Building Stronger Futures charitable initiative and our creation of the Philip Hochstein Fellowship at SFU’s Beedie School of Business. To sponsor our AGM gala, please contact Vanessa at vanessa@icba.ca for sponsorship details.

Tickets on sale now at www.icba.ca/agm

With our head office in Burnaby, we offer a lot of courses close to home. But Victoria, Prince George, Fort St John and Abbotsford, we haven’t forgotten about you!

We are bringing our Introduction to Blueprint Reading course to Victoria on October 24, Prince George on November 8, Fort St John on November 15, and Abbotsford on December 12. Our training team knows that we have members and non-members alike who are looking for high-quality, reliable, relevant training in their area, and we want to make sure you have everything you need to succeed in construction.

We’ve talked about our Blueprint reading course many times on Training Thursday, but it’s one we like to keep in the forefront because it’s an extremely important course for many people in the course of their day-to-day work in construction. Here are just a few of the things you’ll learn:

• Understand in general terms the design process and the role of design professionals
• Understand how Building Codes and Bylaws impact blueprints
• Understand specifications and the contractual hierarchy
• Be able to find trade information using blueprints
• Be able to answer basic construction questions related to the layout and installation of materials
• Be able to identify elementary problems or short comings of the blueprints you are using 
• Be familiar with architectural, civil, electrical and mechanical drawings, and how they fit together
• Understand how to convert engineering dimensions to architectural
• Understand symbols, notation, abbreviations and material schedules
• Be able to work with the drawings to obtain basic information on dimension, finishes, details, area calculations, and the ability to do simple material take offs.

You’ll also earn 1 Gold Seal Credit and 8 Group A CPD Points from BC Housing.

You can register for these sessions or any of our other upcoming courses at www.icba.ca/courses. While you’re there, subscribe to our training newsletter at www.icba.ca/trainingnewsletter.

In B.C., most of us feel warm and fuzzy when we think of Swedes. It’s the Canuck effect: Henrik and Daniel Sedin, Markus Naslund, Alex Edler, Matthias Ohlund, Thomas Gradin, Patrick Sundstrom, Lars Lindgren and now Elias Petterson and Jonathan Dahlen.

But while our hockey community welcomes Swedish imports, our political system should not.

Swedish governance is a mess right now, and it’s because of its proportional representation electoral system.

The far-right, anti-immigration Swedish Democrats – a party that has more than flirted with outright Nazism – won 17.6% of the vote in this month’s Swedish elections. This puts them in position to determine who gets power in Sweden, where two other parties essentially tied at 40% each.

Think the broader parties should cut them out? Good luck. “This party has increased and made the biggest gains. Everything is about us,” Democrat leader Jimmie Akesson said on election night.

This is a quirk of prop rep, and one we see in democracies all over Europe: fringe parties growing in power. Do you really want that in B.C.?

We don’t. Send us more hockey stars, Sweden. But keep your crazy fringe parties and dangerous prop rep system away from us.

Yet another reason to Stop Prop Rep! www.icba.ca/stopproprep

Pass this post on to your friends and family – David Eby’s draconian, anti-free speech rules won’t allow us to advertise it, but individuals can spread it as much as they like. Let’s make sure every British Columbian sees it.

And stay tuned for more “Tales of Prop Rep Horror”…

Tales of Prop Rep Horror #7 – “Rise of the Dictators”
Tales of Prop Rep Horror #6 – “Indonesian Indecency”
Tales of Prop Rep Horror #5 – “Beware the Greeks!”
Tales of Prop Rep Horror #4 – “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! NO! NO! NO!”
Tales of Prop Rep Horror #3 – “From Russia With Blood”
Tales of Prop Rep Horror #2 – “The Pain in Spain”
Tales of Prop Rep Horror #1 – “The Puzzle of Brussels”

Kitimat’s own David Johnston joins Jordan Bateman to talk about #TheNorthMatters and their pro-LNG rallies in Kitimat and Terrace:

Sept. 28, 4-6PM, City Center Mall, Kitimat
Spet. 29, 3-5PM, George Little Park, Terrace

John Horgan is shamelessly using tens of billions in public construction and infrastructure spending to settle political debts to his allies in the old-school building trades unions, giving these few unions a monopoly on taxpayer-funded work.

A wide cross section of the province’s business and labour community has called on him to back down, and ICBA is leading a large coalition standing up for fairness.

Horgan’s sweetheart ‘deal’ will deliver a cash infusion to the unions, create massive job-site inefficiencies, and deliver far less value for tax dollars than fair procurement practices would.

His so-called ‘Community Benefits Agreement’ will narrow the range of bidders on public projects and, even more troublingly, force member-ship in the highly partisan building trades unions.

The new reality for public construction is this: Successful bidders will have to borrow their workforces from a new government agency that will act as the centrally planned employer. This discriminates against the 85 per cent of B.C. construction workers not represented by the building trades.

Complex and productivity-killing rules about which union has “jurisdiction” over each task – largely abandoned elsewhere in the construction industry – will be in full force. And individual workers will be forced to join an NDP-approved union, with no regard to individual choice and rights.

Horgan’s gift-to-the-building- trades is copied out of the flawed Glen Clark playbook from the 1990s – which drove up labour costs on the Island Highway project by close to 40 per cent.

It’s nearly a quarter-of-a-century later, and the building trades rep-resent even less of the construction industry today than they did then. It simply defies belief that the NDP has nevertheless put us back on that same ruinous road, where worker rights and taxpayer value get thoroughly trampled.

Read more

ICBA’s Jordan Bateman talked with Howe Street’s Jim Goddard about the NDP’s so-called “speculation” tax and what he’s looking for in municipal candidates.

The Independent Contractors and Businesses Association (ICBA) and WorkSafeBC are pleased to announce the 2018 Gord Stewart Construction Workplace Health and Safety Innovation Award is now open for entries from eligible ICBA members and their employees.

About the Award

The Workplace Health and Safety Innovation Award is presented annually to acknowledge individuals and companies for their efforts in the prevention of workplace incidents, injuries and illnesses. By honouring safety leaders and sharing their ideas ICBA and WorkSafeBC hope to encourage new programs, policies, and projects that improve the health and safety of workers.

The award recognizes the employee or team of employees who come up with an innovative program, policy, tool or project that demonstrates a proven accomplishment in the area of health and safety for the construction industry sector.

There is a $5,000 prize for the best submission and will be presented at the ICBA AGM Dinner on Tuesday, November 20 at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver.

Eligibility

All employees of ICBA member companies are eligible for the Annual Awards for Innovation in Workplace Health and Safety for Construction.

Click HERE for a full list of award guidelines and HERE for a submission form.

Nominations must be received by Nov. 1, 2018.

VANCOUVER – The Independent Contractors and Businesses Association (ICBA) and Canada West Construction Union yesterday filed leave to appeal a BC Supreme Court decision against an injunction to pause the proportional representation referendum process.

On August 28th, Justice Miriam Gropper turned down ICBA’s request for an injunction to pause the referendum process until the legality of the process could be confirmed in court.

The NDP Government has been dragging its heels on defending its referendum process, taking over two months to file a response to ICBA’s challenge. “The NDP Government talks a lot about democracy and having a fair debate, but they have shown no willingness to respond in a reasonable fashion – it’s their rules, it’s their process and it’s their referendum – they need to show up. We prepared our challenge within a week, and they needed more than two months,” said Chris Gardner, president of ICBA.

ICBA first filed its concerns with the process in early July, as soon as Attorney General David Eby released the rules. “As we have said from the start, the referendum question is confusing, the process was rushed, and there was little consultation,” said Gardner. “Given that the NDP government needs so much time to defend its own law and regulations, we think the only fair and reasonable course is for the referendum to be postponed.”

ICBA’s original case against the NDP government continues on and ICBA is hopeful that the government will agree to a court date in the fall. But until then, ICBA is seeking an injunction because the government is attempting to “run out the clock” and leave the courts with little practical remedy should the ICBA prevail in court, because the referendum will already be over.

“We know the NDP Government would rather the whole proportional representation referendum proceed with little scrutiny or debate, but we believe that British Columbians deserve better than this and our democracy deserves better than this,” said Gardner. “If the NDP wants to hold a referendum, then its incumbent upon them to be fair – why not take the same approach as the former government in 2005 and 2009?”

“Changing how we elect our government requires a fair and open process with a clear question and a timeline that will allow for a robust debate. It neither fair nor democratic for the NDP Government to effectively rig the question and the process to provoke the result it wants.”

The ICBA is arguing in court that the referendum question and process is fundamentally flawed:

• It is not consistent with the NDP Government’s own Referendum Act, which calls for “a clear statement of the majority of voters on whether or not to implement a well-defined and comprehensible new voting system”;
• A binding referendum must be supported “by a clear majority on a clear question”;
• It is inconsistent with sections 2(b) and 3 of the Charter, “which give British Columbians the right to meaningfully participate in a fair and comprehensible referendum process” in relation to fundamental changes to the electoral system;
• It is inconsistent with sections 2(b) and 2(d) of the Charter, which require that “British Columbians be able to fully express themselves and debate fundamental changes to the design of the democratic system”; and,
• The regulations unlawfully restrict freedom of expression on matters of public interest.

For the full text of ICBA’s original application for an injunction, click HERE. To read the original petition, click HERE.