It’s a great racket
By Martin Patriquin - Friday, November 11, 2011 - 0 Comments
Threats, violence and a union boss named Rambo. Just another week at a Quebec construction union.
Mario Beauregard/CP
By appearances alone, Bernard Gauthier makes for a great villain. His nickname is Rambo, and though he came by it honestly enough—he served eight years in the Canadian military—it is fitting for a 200-plus-lb. man with a mohawk, an earring and a mouth that would mightily challenge even the most adept broadcast censor. A construction worker practically since he could pick up a hammer, Gauthier is arguably the most notorious and divisive union figure in Quebec today. He is a hero to the men he oversees as a representative with FTQ-Construction, while his critics, and there are many, see him as a thuggish throwback who rules fist-first over his territory.
“We are against violence, but honestly, telling a goddamn bastard that he’s a goddamn bastard feels good,” Gauthier told Maclean’s from his office in Sept-Îles recently. “It’s liberating. It takes out 50 per cent of the rage in your heart. And now you can’t do it. If you do, you’re accused of intimidation, tabarnac.”
Gauthier sees many bastards in his life these days, chief among them Jean Charest’s Liberal government, whose proposed law, Bill C-33, would remove the union movement’s power to dictate which members get to work on which job sites in the province. The practice, known as “hiring hall,” has long been a hallmark of labour codes across North America and Europe, and the Quebec government’s plan to strip it away has Gauthier furious. “We had a nice industry that was quiet, that was flourishing. It was going well, goddammit,” he spits. “Now they’re going to turn it all to s–t.”
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So-so-so, so much for union solidarity in Quebec
By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 10:32 AM - 0 Comments
Attempts to reform the construction industry have exposed a deep rift between its unions
Fanny Levesque/Canadian Press/Le Soleil
By appearances alone, Bernard Gauthier makes for a great villain. His nickname is Rambo, and though he came by it honestly enough—he served eight years in the Canadian military—it is fitting for 200-plus-pound man with a mohawk, an earring and a mouth that would mightily challenge even the most adept broadcast censor.
A construction worker practically since he could pick up a hammer, Gauthier is arguably the most notorious and divisive union figure in Quebec today. He is a hero to the men he oversees as a representative with the FTQ-Construction, the largest construction labour union federation in Quebec; his critics, and there are many, see him as a thuggish throwback who rules jealously and fist-first over his territory.“We are against violence, but honestly, telling a goddamn bastard that he’s a goddamn bastard feels good,” Gauthier told Maclean’s from his office in Sept-Îles recently. “It’s liberating. It takes out 50 per cent of the rage in your heart. And now you can’t do it. If you do, you’re accused of intimidation, tabarnac.”
Gauthier sees many bastards in his life these days, chief among them the members of Jean Charest’s Liberal government, whose proposed law, Bill C-33, would remove the union movement’s power to dictate which union members get to work on which job site in the province. Continue…
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Are voters finally fed up with Jean Charest’s flip-flops?
By Martin Patriquin - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments
The Quebec premier tends to reverse himself only after incurring maximum political damage
Jacques Boissinot/CP
Jean Charest stays in power because of his political smarts, his eye for the jugular and his ability to, time and again, defy expectations. At least, this is the accepted wisdom when describing how Charest, who has never exactly warmed Quebec’s collective heart, has managed to become one of the country’s longest-serving premiers. He is a constant in a fractured political landscape: the 53-year-old has faced no less than five Parti Québécois leaders over three elections. And he has strongly hinted he’s hungry for more.
Yet if Charest has a weakness, it’s his own tendency to make and hold to highly contentious decisions, only to reverse himself once the decision has incurred the maximum political damage on his own government. Exhibit A: the premier recently said he’d be open to holding some form of public inquiry into the province’s demonstrably corrupt construction industry—something the opposition, the voting public and several municipal officials have pleaded for throughout the last two years. And as lukewarm as Charest’s endorsement may sound, it constitutes nothing short of a huge climbdown for the premier, who has spent much of this time refusing to even consider the possibility.
There are many such grand reversals throughout Charest’s eight years in office. The building of the CHUM, Montreal’s French superhospital, was delayed by Charest’s insistence that it be located in the municipality of Outremont, even though the public overwhelmingly favoured a downtown site. Only after the ensuing squabble—which delayed the project by upwards of four years, according to former Université de Montréal rector Robert Lacroix—did the premier reverse himself.
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A built-in advantage
By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 12:40 PM - 11 Comments
Hutterite-run firms don’t pay their workers wages or seek big profits. Competitors say it’s unfair.
Tim Smith/Rogue Collective
Competitive spirit might run through the veins of any good businessman, but a handful of Prairie companies say they can’t win the war against some unlikely rivals in the building supply trade—Hutterite colonists. Frustrated by a steady drift of metal roof and siding orders to Hutterite-owned competitors, building supply companies are pressuring the Manitoba government to take action, arguing the market is tilted in favour of Hutterite enterprises because colony members work for free, and because their firms are exempt from certain taxes.
The Hutterites are an Anabaptist sect whose adherents live communally, sharing resources and property on farming colonies that speckle the southern Prairies and parts of the U.S. plains. For the most part, they’ve coexisted peacefully with neighbours, but tensions began rising in the 1990s, when some colonies turned to commercial enterprises to help support their way of life, raising the unexpected question of whether communal living constitutes an unfair advantage in the marketplace.
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No room for the view
By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 14 Comments
The Squamish Nation plan a condo project that flouts Vancouver’s rules
Photograph by Nick Westover
It’s just steps from Granville Island and Kitsilano Beach, and with to-die-for views of English Bay and the snow-tipped North Shore mountains, this 10-acre site at the south end of the Burrard Bridge—among the last open stretches of undeveloped city waterfront—may be the Lower Mainland’s hottest empty lot. Empty except for a totem pole and a thick tangle of blackberry bushes, the site belongs to the Squamish Nation.
And it will soon play host to a massive new real-estate development: a $1-billion, two-tower, mixed-use job that will, according to early drawings, block the city’s carefully preserved ocean and mountain views and dramatically densify sleepy Kitsilano.
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The house Maclean's built
By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 6:44 PM - 1 Comment
Residents battle a developer over the fate of J.B. Maclean’s home
The neighbours are furious, but their protests can barely be heard over the sound of contractors shattering glass and pummelling concrete at 7 Austin Terrace, the former home of Lt.-Col. J.B. Maclean, the founder of Maclean’s magazine. By the time they’re done, gone will be some of the century-old Toronto home’s most distinctive architectural features—windows, wood frames, columns, and the portico are already mostly destroyed.Robert Levy, the president of the local housing association in Casa Loma, the northwest Toronto neighbourhood where Maclean House is located, stopped by the home earlier this week. The workers, he says, “were trying do as much damage as they possibly could. This basically had every characteristic of vandals going to town.” According to Levy and members of the housing association, John Todd, the local developer who purchased Maclean House in 2008, is scrambling to prevent it from being designated as a historical site by the city. Should it be recognized as such, Todd’s plans to demolish the $2.3-million residence and replace it with a new housing development would grind to a halt.
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Econowatch
By Steve Maich - Friday, October 16, 2009 at 8:30 AM - 1 Comment
A weekly scorecard on the state of the economy in North America and beyond
The Canadian economy has answered a lot of questions for us in the past few months. Our housing market stumbled, but didn’t go into free fall. Our mining, manufacturing and construction industries suffered, but did not collapse. Retail sales slowed, but you won’t see row upon row of boarded-up stores when you venture out holiday shopping next month. And, of course, it turns out our banks are a fair bit more solid than many gave them credit for.All of that must qualify as welcome and somewhat surprising news, and the latest bit of encouragement came last week with the release of September jobs figures. As the kids headed back to school, the employment situation in the U.S. continued to worsen—another 263,000 jobs vapourized as the world’s largest economy searches for a way to staunch the bleeding. But in Canada, 31,000 jobs were created, a second straight month of improvement, far outpacing even the rosiest projections on Bay Street. Continue…
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Attack of the condo craters
By Jason Kirby - Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 5:30 PM - 17 Comments
If projects fail, will our cities be left with huge holes to fill?
Update: In a story published in this week’s issue of Maclean’s (and on the Web below) we look at the plague of condo holes afflicting Canada’s once-hot real estate markets. With several construction projects halted, and rumours flying around many others, we thought we’d found a bright spot with Vancouver’s Ritz Carlton condominium development. The project was put on hold last year. Then earlier this month several backhoes returned to the site and resumed moving dirt. The developer didn’t return calls confirming whether the Ritz was back on or not, but we decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. We did so too soon. On Wednesday the Vancouver Sun reported the luxury condo project has officially been killed.It’s worth noting the location of the Ritz project is a particularly sensitive one for Vancouver’s bruised real estate ego. When the last bubble burst in the 1990s, a half-built concrete tower was abandoned there. For years it was an ugly reminder of the excesses the city’s real estate developers, investors and buyers are prone to. Now a six storey-deep hole in the exact same spot could prove to be an eyesore for months, even years, to come.
