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“Community benefit agreements ensure projects will be on time, on budget, fair wages are paid to everyone and importantly that legacy of new workers for the future,” said Horgan.

Photo by DARRYL DYCK / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Photo by DARRYL DYCK / THE CANADIAN PRESS

The changes were immediately hailed by unions as a way to fix B.C.’s shortage of skilled tradespeople, as well as give women and Aboriginal people more opportunities to enter construction. But independent non-union contractors, who represent more than 80 per cent of the industry workforce, said those justifications are a smokescreen for a return to union-only sites, labour halls and favouritism for building trades that will cause projects to be more expensive and cumbersome.

Horgan rejected those arguments, saying B.C. needed to solve its labour shortage and be competitive in attracting workers.

“The cost of making sure we’re training the next generation of workers is one, I think, British Columbians understand,” he said.

Horgan hailed it as “a new way of doing business in British Columbia.”

However, the new rules are quite similar to how the NDP handled public construction projects in the 1990s. At that time, the party was criticized for providing lucrative incentives to unions that donated to the NDP and organized to its election campaigns.

In the 1990s, the government created Highway Constructors Ltd. to employ workers building the Island Highway expansion project. Though it allowed non-union companies to bid and win contracts, any of the workers who entered the site had to join a union within 30 days, as well as set a “fair wage policy” mandating union pay. An analysis by the Vancouver Board of Trade estimated that added $70 million in additional costs to the project.