Gil McGowan was elected president of the Alberta Federation of Labour in 2005, just as oilsands development was starting to heat up.

And he has been in the hot seat ever since.

From the beginning, McGowan was determined to take on the oilsands giants on behalf of unionized workers who he feared were losing out.

He accused companies of turning to unions and “telling tall tales about labour shortages.”

In 2006, he says, in the early months of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s first government, he was invited by federal bureaucrats to a meeting at the Hotel Macdonald in Edmonton. There were about 50 participants, mostly executives with oil and construction companies who were already involved in oilsands development or eager to get in on it.

“The federal government representatives basically said, ‘What can we do for you?’” McGowan recalled during a recent interview. “And almost everyone in the room said they needed temporary foreign workers because they couldn’t carry out their plans with the existing Canadian labour force.”

McGowan, currently the federal NDP candidate for Edmonton Centre, said it was clear that the executives wanted the kind of access to migrant labour that is common in oil-rich Middle East countries.

In November 2006, the government announced changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program that enabled employers to recruit skilled foreign workers faster than before.

Also in 2006, the Alberta government applied a rarely used section of its labour code to allow Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (CNRL) to have one bargaining unit for all construction workers building its multibillion-dollar Horizon mine as well as its upgrader, a plant that processes bitumen so it can be handled by refineries. On a big construction site like Horizon, there is a primary construction company, but that company will subcontract with smaller firms that specialize in particular trades, jobs or areas of expertise. Those subcontractors could have negotiated union agreements with their workers.

The Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC) was appointed bargaining agent; CLAC is not recognized by the Canadian trade union movement.

This allowed contractors to recruit skilled foreign workers such as carpenters, welders and pipefitters, since they wouldn’t have to go through union hiring halls.

By late 2007, the federal government had expanded the list of occupations that could be fast-tracked into Alberta and B.C. to include low-skilled workers such as food counter attendants, food and beverage servers and hotel housekeeping staff.

By 2012, there were 68,000 temporary foreign workers in Alberta, 20 per cent of the Canadian total.

Dominique Gross, a professor in the school of public policy at Simon Fraser University, wrote in a 2014 paper on the Temporary Foreign Worker Program for the C.D. Howe Institute: “… the policy changes occurred when there was little empirical evidence of shortage in many occupations.”

“The changes to the (foreign worker program) were all about union-busting, driving down wages,” says McGowan, who notes that service sector wages did not rise as they would have had there been a labour shortage.

Wages did rise significantly in the Alberta construction sector. In terms of purchasing power, they increased by 84 per cent between 2001 and 2013, from $863 a week to $1,586.

“It’s like a tsunami … a confluence of forces working in the same direction,” says Emilson Silva, a professor of business economics at the University of Alberta. “When there is a boom, demand for labour goes up, the cost of housing goes up, wages go up.”

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But Silva says oilsands developers also found that even though the price of oil was surging, their costs for wages and materials were eating into revenues because there was so much competition for both.

“One wonders if some of these companies weren’t just playing it by ear,” says McGowan. “There was so much going on at once that some construction sites just weren’t that well organized.

“Peter Lougheed was much more methodical. The rapid pace of development and all the problems it created would never have happened if he had been premier at the time.”