On unneeded imports

The Tyee discusses an attempt by a foreign contractor to bypass Canada's construction market by seeking a special dispensation to import foreign workers - which would seemingly leave the Cons with a fairly clear choice as to whose interests should be defended:

When it comes to one of B.C.’s controversial new “public private partnerships,” the construction of the new Golden Ears Bridge across the Fraser between Maple Ridge and Langley, the German company recently granted the Translink construction contract says that finding skilled workers in Canada is murder. The firm, Bilfinger Berger, is asking for government permission to bring in workers from off shore to address what they portray as a shortage of skilled workers.

Local labour and business leaders, on the other hand, are calling on the government to deny Bilfinger Berger’s request, insisting that there are more than enough skilled Canadian tradespeople looking for work to meet the project’s needs, and that the company’s attempts to hire Canadian workers have been half-hearted at best...

Jim Bromley, regional manager of Harris Rebar, North America’s largest reinforcing company, testified to the frustrating experience his firm had endured trying to secure subcontracting work the Golden Ears Bridge while doing business as a union shop employing Canadian labour. Bromley said the German company had repeatedly provided inadequate drawings for use in preparing a bid, conducted several meetings and then announced the Harris bid was too high and that they would not get the work...

In all, at least four B.C. firms made such approaches to the German company, and all were turned down. (Besides Harris, the other unsuccessful candidates were G&M Steel Services Ltd., Acier AGF and Prince George Steel.) The letters referred to “incomplete”, “imprecise” and “imperfect” drawings made available to them by Bilfinger Berger, a common account that poses questions for some observers about just how serious the German firm was about sourcing their skilled labour in Canada.

“It’s very unusual to get such vague drawings when bidding on a subcontract,” Harris Rebar’s Bromley told the Tyee.

Another businessman who bid on the Golden Ears work experienced more than imprecise drawings. John Dinicola is the president of G&M Steel Services, and he told the Tyee that he met with Axel Metzger of Bilfinger Berger earlier this summer to discuss his company’s interest in bidding on rebar work on the Golden Ears Bridge. Metzger told him, Dinicola says, that Bilfinger “would not be blackmailed by contractors on the price, they were a very large, important company and if they needed to, they would just go offshore and obtain lower priced workers.”...

In order to gain federal permission to import foreign construction workers, an employer is first required to persuade the government that he has sought Canadian workers unsuccessfully. The job fair that Bilfinger held to invite applications for work on Golden Ears was scheduled, union sources say, on a Sunday morning of Father’s Day this year, a timing that may account for the low turn out of local applicants. Oddly enough, despite the four Canadian companies that are known to have bid on iron work subcontracts on the bridge project, Terrence Cage, project manager for Bilfinger on the project adamantly insisted in a recent meeting, the Ironworker’ Perley Holmes told the Tyee, that his company had received no bids from contractors to install rebar.

Needless to say, the purpose of a permit to bring in foreign workers shouldn't be to suppress wages in Canada when there's no lack of supply of local workers prepared to carry out the job. And the battle lines aren't even along the lines of labour vs. business: the question is simply whether Bilfinger will be able to sidestep Canadian business and labour in order to impose its own standards on Canadian soil.

Of course, there are precious few cases where the need to defend Canadian interests is so obvious that even the Cons could be expected not to sell them out. But with both businesses and labour fighting to have their interests balanced against the a contractor's alleged entitlement to special permission solely in order to bypass Canadian market rates for subcontractors, this may just such a situation. And if the Cons really are far enough out of touch to see no problem granting such a request, that'll make for all the more reason to laugh at their claim to have the interests of Canadian industry and workers in mind.