Moving Mountains
Work has mostly completed on Canada’s largest infrastructure project—thanks to thousands of Local 68 members
By Kevin Kohut, BC Director
Something remarkable happened on August 25, 2024. After 10 years of building the Site C dam—some of them tumultuous—the process of filling the dam’s reservoir began. Filling it is expected to take four months. The reservoir of the 60-metre-tall earth-filled dam will be over 40 metres deep when filled.
Once the reservoir is full, all six generating units will begin operation some time in 2025. According to BC Hydro, the dam will provide 1,100 megawatts of capacity, increasing BC Hydro’s supply by eight percent. Over the course of a year, it will generate 5,100 gigawatt hours of electricity—enough clean energy to fuel 1.7 million electric vehicles per year or power 450,000 houses!
The Site C project is the third dam and hydroelectric generating station on the Peace River in northeastern BC. ReNew magazine’s list of the largest infrastructure projects across the country has the Site C dam at number one.
The project was given environmental approval by the federal and provincial governments in October 2014. Local 68 members’ boots first hit the ground to work on the project in 2015. Since then, as the project ramped up, many thousands of members have worked on the project. Some have worked on it for many years, moving to northern BC and making it their home.
But in 2017, with the election of the NDP/Green Party coalition government in BC, the project’s future—and the lives of the members working on it—was suddenly in limbo. Both coalition parties had campaigned to cancel the project. Thankfully, after review, the government allowed it to proceed. This came as a huge relief to the over 1,100 Local 68 members working at Site C at the time, many of whom had made life-changing decisions and financial commitments based on their employment on the project.
We couldn’t be prouder of these highly skilled members for the countless hours of hard work performed safely and professionally working on the project. And especially all the stewards who worked tirelessly to help us navigate the many challenges of representing members working on a project of this magnitude over the course of a decade. Some of these challenges included
• amending shift cycles in the early days to provide a better work-life balance for members.
• working on a project under a political microscope, enduring threats from some in government trying to shut the project down.
• ongoing geological challenges.
• tensions you naturally face with a workforce combining local workers from Fort St. John with thousands living on site in camp, some of whom came from across the country.
• dealing with a raid attempt by the Teamsters, Operating Engineers, and Labourers unions.
• unprecedented challenges when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 with lockdowns and camp quarantines, which required negotiating very creative extended schedules that allowed members to keep working.
With the dam now nearly finished and ready to begin producing clean electricity, we extend a big thank you to the thousands of Local 68 members who literally moved mountains over this past decade to see the Site C Clean Energy Project through to completion. Well done!