Sunday, August 21, 2022

I’ll Meet You in the Lobby

CLAC campaigned to improve community benefits agreement to provide opportunity for all

By Andrew Regnerus, Ontario Construction Coordinator

When special interest groups try to influence government, we call it lobbying. The term comes from the practice of encountering elected officials in the halls and lobbies of the legislature.

Special interest groups (unions, charities, industry, etc.) promote policy that is good for their, well, interests. They want unique outcomes that may differ from what others want (e.g., labour versus owners or one union versus another).

Lobbyists try to persuade elected officials and bureaucrats. Politicians rely on lobbyists as they aren’t experts in everything. They count on at least some of their constituents benefitting from that special interest.

CLAC’s Ontario construction team lobbies municipal and provincial government, too. CLAC lobbies for fair tendering and training support from government so that you and your fellow members can flourish. We also promote the benefits of our unique multitrade, work community approach to representing workers with government officials.

Last month, our lobby team went to Ottawa to attend the Association of Municipalities conference where we met with municipal government employees (e.g., chief administrative officers) and politicians (e.g., mayors and councillors). Our message was about how to do community benefits agreement (CBAs) well.

CBAs are tacked on to public construction and other contracts so that governments can leverage their infrastructure spending to achieve social benefits. An example is requiring the contractor who wins the bid to employ a minimum number of apprentices who are women or racialized workers. The goal is to not only build that new $10 million bridge but ensure good employment outcomes for the community.

CLAC sponsored a couple of events in Ottawa to increase awareness about preferred practices for implementing CBAs (go to clacevents.ca/AMOconference2022/ to learn more). Our panels included procurement leaders from municipalities who have good CBA practices—those that use an inclusive model of construction representation.

We added research from the think tank Cardus (A Framework for Implementing Community Benefits Agreements) to provide academic proof that our approach to CBAs is the one that governments and municipalities should implement. (You can find a summary of the Cardus report on canada.constructconnect.com, “Industry Perspectives Op-Ed: Collaboration critical to successful CBAs, says think-tank Cardus.”)

Our campaign to improve CBAs will help ensure that you and your fellow members have access to public procurement projects while meeting government objectives for social benefits within their communities.

I’ll Meet You in the Lobby

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