ICBA Coffee & Construction

David Eby rolled out three income tax hikes this weekend. Meanwhile, Cenovus is putting $5.7 billion into Alberta oil sands. Only one of them is spending their own money.   Episode 38 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to the people who build British Columbia and Alberta, with ICBA's Jordan Bateman. On today's show:   ☕ THE BIG ONE: Eby's tax hike — two points more on incom...

Tuesday, Kitimat got a yes. Thursday, a pipeline got a yes. Ottawa listed the West Coast Oil Pipeline, now called Pacific Link, as a project of national interest: one million barrels a day from near Bruderheim, Alberta, to Roberts Bank. But a listing isn't a final investment decision, and British Columbians vote October 24.   Episode 37 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to...

Shovels went in Friday at Neptune Bulk Terminals in North Vancouver. Canpotex is putting $500 million of private money into rebuilding it, with 400 to 500 construction jobs on the North Shore through 2028.   Episode 36 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to the people who build British Columbia and Alberta, with ICBA's Jordan Bateman. On today's show:   ☕ THE BIG ONE: Canpot...

David Eby had a one-seat majority, a record $13.8-billion deficit, and an opposition whose leader quit on Sunday. On Tuesday he called an election two years early. Before he did, he paused the PST on your engineer. Paused, not scrapped.   Episode 34 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to the people who build British Columbia and Alberta, with ICBA's Jordan Bateman. On today's...

Reuters says the partners in LNG Canada could approve a second $40-billion plant in Kitimat as early as October. Two days after the investment summit closed, the first real deal is on the table. Meanwhile David Eby says he's getting ready for an election, half of B.C. says it has no party worth cheering for, and Alberta's own report puts the price of leaving Canada at up to $170 billion.   Episode...

For every dollar per worker an American business puts into machinery and equipment, a Canadian company puts in 32 cents. That's the whole Canadian productivity story in one number — and this week Ottawa finally went after it. The new Productivity Mega Deduction lets you write off the whole machine the year it goes to work instead of a spoonful a year for a decade. It applies to anything acquired o...

Inflation stuck at three per cent this morning, with gas still up 23 per cent and Brent back above $108. And tonight, 250 people who run companies overseeing nearly $120 trillion sit down to dinner with Mark Carney in Toronto. He wants $1 trillion of it. The pitch book has 167 projects — and a lot of them are ours.   Episode 31 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to the peopl...

Wednesday, in the Canada Gazette, Ottawa took pipelines, transmission lines, oilsands projects and gas-fired power off the Impact Assessment Agency's desk. One regulator now instead of two. Then ICBA filed on the West Coast pipeline, Alberta broke ground twice in two days, and B.C.'s forest sector told the Premier it's at the breaking point.   Episode 30 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the new...

Canada lost 42,000 jobs in August. Or did it? Monthly job numbers bounce like a pickup on a logging road. Meanwhile, ICBA filed its pre-budget submission with Ottawa this morning: 15 recommendations, starting with the number that explains the last decade — in 2014 a Canadian company invested 87 cents per worker for every U.S. dollar. By 2024, 54 cents. We stopped building capacity before Trump sho...

WorkSafeBC has proposed the biggest expansion of its own authority in a generation. A new class of hazard that covers "the design and management of work" — your crew size, your schedule, your workload, your deadlines. A written risk assessment for every one of them. And a standard nobody can define until after a complaint gets filed. Employers got eight weeks to respond, in the middle of construct...

Natural Resources Canada counted 504 major resource projects across the country — $633 billion of potential capital spending. ICBA Economics went and counted what's been announced since, and added another hundred billion. Call it three quarters of a trillion dollars sitting on the books. The only question that matters is how much of it actually gets poured.   Episode 26 of ICBA Coffee & Constr...

Wednesday night, in the back of a downtown Vancouver White Spot, a couple dozen people were supposed to talk about the future of free enterprise in British Columbia. More than 60 walked in. Standing room only. Jordan Bateman was there — and he came out more optimistic than he's been in a long time. Here's the rant that came with it: the Eby record, the mess the BC Conservatives have made, and the...

No deal. Late Friday night, the Canada-U.S. trade talks collapsed — and at 12:01 Saturday morning, 50 per cent American tariffs hit roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian goods. Cement. Lumber, plywood, doors. Machinery. Even hockey sticks. Seventy years of building things together, and it's come to this. Episode 23 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to the people who build B...

Two pipelines. Two LNG plants. One housing market flat on its back. The next four months decide all of it — so Jordan Bateman went to the boss. Chris Gardner, president and CEO of ICBA, Canada's largest construction association, on the decisions coming at B.C. builders this fall and what has to happen to win them. Episode 22 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to the people w...

On October 1, every engineering bill in British Columbia gets seven per cent more expensive. Every architect's invoice. Every accountant's. Even the legislature's own finance committee says don't do it. In a first for the show, Jordan Bateman sits down with a guest from outside ICBA: Gavin Dew, MLA for Kelowna-Mission and the Conservative critic for Economic Development — a small-business owner wh...

Site C. Coastal GasLink. Trans Mountain. LNG Canada Phase One. The wave of megaprojects that carried British Columbia for a decade has finished — basically all at once. A second wave is lining up behind it. But lining up isn't the same as starting, and somewhere in between is a stretch where the phone stops ringing. Episode 20 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to the people...

A ten-billion-dollar pipeline just hired its first land crew — and the company is rooted in Fort St John. That's how it's supposed to work. Plus: five days to the tariff wall, Calgary builds a front door for trade, and Jock Finlayson runs the numbers on Canada's "move away" from fossil fuels. Episode 19 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to the people who build British Colum...

B.C. just booked the biggest deficit in its history — $7.7 billion — and called it good news. How? One-time money, and $4 billion of hospitals and roads that simply didn't get built. Same week, Alberta swung from a $9.4-billion deficit forecast to an estimated $3.8-billion surplus. One of those is an economy. The other is an accounting trick. Episode 18 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news...

Twelve thousand people were ordered out of Summerland just after midnight Saturday. More than twenty thousand people across the Okanagan woke up somewhere else this morning. The people come first today — and then a July jobs report that says B.C. construction hit an all-time high, in the same month developers were laying people off. Episode 17 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matt...

Not that long ago, British Columbia was an economic leader in Canada. No more. Too much debt and bloat, not enough investment and revenue. In less than a decade, B.C. has gone from leader to laggard. Episode 16 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to the people who build British Columbia and Alberta, with ICBA's Jordan Bateman. A special edition: a full sit-down with ICBA Chie...

A million barrels a day, Bruderheim to the coast. Ottawa started the thirty-day clock on it Saturday of the long weekend — buried in the Canada Gazette, with no release and no tweet. If you believe a project is in the national interest, say so in daylight. Episode 15 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to the people who build British Columbia and Alberta, with ICBA's Jordan B...

Nearly $318 billion of work. 1,030 projects. That's Alberta's Major Projects registry — this morning. The question isn't whether the work is there. It's who's going to build it. Episode 14 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to the people who build British Columbia and Alberta, with ICBA's Jordan Bateman. A special edition: our FIRST-EVER guest, ICBA Alberta President Mike Ma...

Interfor started as a coastal logging outfit in British Columbia in 1963. Sixty-three years later, its head office is packing up for Peachtree City, Georgia. Eighty-four per cent of its lumber sales are American now. Episode 13 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to the people who build British Columbia and Alberta, with ICBA's Jordan Bateman. On today's show: ☕ THE BIG ONE:...

She'd never set foot in Vancouver. She called into a Vancouver public hearing from Los Angeles anyway. Council asked her one real question. Six seconds of silence. Then a cough. Episode 12 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to the people who build British Columbia and Alberta, with ICBA's Jordan Bateman. On today's show: ☕ THE BIG ONE: A union machine hijacks Vancouver city...