OTTAWA — The Canadian Construction Association (CCA) has issued a statement criticizing the project labour agreement (PLA) between the Ottawa Hospital and the Unionized Building and Construction Trades of Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec.
In an April 24 statement, the CCA said the Ottawa Hospital’s investment of $2.8 billion in a new Civic Campus will likely cost taxpayers hundreds of millions more and leave a majority of Ottawa-area construction workers ineligible to work on the vital project.
The CCA is calling for governments to roll back procurement models that restrict participation to traditional trade unions and their employers.
Under the PLA, members of the Progressive Contractors Association of Canada and their affiliated union, the Christian Labour Union of Canada, among others, will be unable to bid on or participate in the project. A report by the Montreal Economic Institute stated the Ottawa Hospital’s PLA will “stifle competition, escalating project costs by between $168 million and $525 million,” said the CCA statement. The authors of the report find it “unacceptable for a public entity to make taxpayers pay more by granting exclusivity to a specific group of affiliated workers,” the CCA added.
The CCA pointed to British Columbia’s Pattullo Bridge project and the labour requirements of the new federal clean tax credits established in Budget 2023 as other examples of agreements that discriminate against non-union construction workers.
“The Canadian Construction Association takes issue with these examples and others that either categorically exclude or strongly disadvantage one group of workers,” said CCA president Mary Van Buren in the statement. “We would take a similarly forceful position if the reverse had happened and union workers had been excluded or disadvantaged.”
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