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 Bateman. On today's show:

☕ THE BIG ONE: Ottawa moves to designate the West Coast oil pipeline a project in the national interest under the Building Canada Act. One million barrels a day from Bruderheim, Alberta to a deepwater port at Roberts Bank in Delta. Trans Mountain and Pembina are the partners. Comments close September 18; the target for designation is October 1. Plus a point-by-point answer to the "breakneck speed" crowd — because thirty-four days from public pitch to a legally required notice, on top of a six-week comment window, is not breakneck. It's the statutory process, followed to the letter.
🇺🇸 THE RISK NOBODY NAMES: Canada is the fourth-largest oil producer on earth, and we sell almost all of it to one customer — a customer scheduled to drop a 50% tariff on twenty billion dollars of our goods in two weeks. So explain the calculation where access to the entire Pacific market is the risky option and staying hostage to Washington is the safe one.
🛢️ WE ASKED. HE ANSWERED: Last show we asked whether cabinet solidarity means anything in David Eby's government, after a minister went public against her own cabinet's approval of the $2-billion Tilbury LNG expansion. Turns out the Premier already answered — he says his government is a "big tent," and that on her statement, "we worked together." He helped write it. Eleven hundred construction jobs a year, $260 million in tax revenue, a Musqueam equity stake — approved by his cabinet, then undercut by his cabinet, with his editing help.
🚧 A BILLION DOLLARS FOR PIPE IN THE GROUND: Canada and Alberta sign roughly $938 million for water and wastewater infrastructure to enable new housing. Not a tender — a funding agreement. But servicing is the most binding constraint in this business, and every builder listening has had a project die on a servicing letter. Mains, lift stations, treatment upgrades, reservoirs. Watch your council agendas.

🎙️ THIS FRIDAY — a special edition. ICBA Chief Economist Jock Finlayson, one-on-one, on From Leader to Laggard: the debt, the missing private-sector jobs, and why he says blaming Trump for B.C.'s problems is the easy answer and the wrong one.

📊 Get the ICBA Economics briefing — the most helpful email you'll get all week: https://icba.ca/economics

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 Martens.

☕ THE BIG PICTURE: $317.9 BILLION across 1,030 projects on the province's own registry — petrochemical, oil and gas, data centres, schools, Calgary office conversions, a fire hall in Lacombe. Is it a boom, or a pipeline that looks like a boom until you check the start dates?
🖥️ TWO WAVES, ONE REGION: Meta's $13-billion data centre in Sturgeon County (3,000 workers at peak) and Dow's Path2Zero restart in Fort Saskatchewan ($10.1 billion, 4,500–5,500 at peak) — same trades, same corner of the province, overlapping windows
🛢️ OIL AND GAS: Alberta, Ottawa and five oilsands producers sign the Pathways carbon capture memorandum. Is the confidence actually back — or is this still paper and not steel?
🏙️ CALGARY'S CASE STUDY: 21 downtown office conversions, 2.68 million square feet of empty office becoming roughly 2,700 homes — while provincial housing starts cool from 55,800 to 46,000
🔧 WHO BUILDS IT: The building trades unions are about 12% of Alberta's construction workforce. Open shop is everybody else. So why does federal trades money keep landing in the same 12%?

🏗️ ICBA Meet the Generals & Owners — Edmonton, Tuesday, September 29, Edmonton Convention Centre. Western Canada's best day of business development. Register: https://events.icba.ca/edmonton

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: Interfor moves corporate functions from Burnaby to Georgia. The mills went south years ago — now the head office follows. And the numbers behind it: 15,000 B.C. forest sector jobs gone since 2022, 21 mills closed since 2023, and a harvest running 32 million cubic metres against the province's own 45-million target. That's a 13-MILLION-cubic-metre hole. Every year.
🛢️ CABINET NIMBYISM: The Eby cabinet approved FortisBC's $2-billion Tilbury LNG expansion in Delta — 1,100 construction jobs a year, $260 million in tax revenue, a Musqueam equity stake, cleaner marine fuel at the Port of Vancouver. Then a sitting cabinet minister went public against her own government's decision. What should have happened next? She should have resigned.
🎯 WHY LNG IS THE NEW TARGET: The campaign against Canadian energy has moved off pipelines and onto LNG — and the tactics have moved too. Off the regulators, onto the banks, the pension funds and the insurers. Plus the part that complicates the story: Cedar LNG is majority-owned by the Haisla Nation, Ksi Lisims is being developed with the Nisga'a.
🚧 WHERE THE WORK IS: RFPs for the first two Fraser River Tunnel work packages hit the market in early August. Nine years, zero lanes, and a price that's gone from $4.15 billion to $8.5 billion — but the work is real and the paperwork drops next week. Go get it.

🎙️ THIS FRIDAY — a special edition. Our first-ever guest: ICBA Alberta President Mike Martens on the $318 billion sitting in Alberta's project registry, the data centre wave, Dow's Path2Zero restart, and who on earth is going to build it all.

📊 Get the ICBA Economics briefing — the most helpful email you'll get all week: https://icba.ca/economics

Read more on today's stories:
Interfor shifting corporate functions to Georgia: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/canadian-lumber-company-interfor-migrate-120021442.html
B.C.'s forest sector and the harvest gap: https://www.biv.com/news/bc-forest-sector-faces-another-tough-year-in-2026-11793817
Canfor closing the Northwood pulp mill in Prince George: https://todayinbc.com/2026/07/15/canfor-closing-prince-george-northwood-pulp-mill-300-jobs-affected/
Jordan Bateman on cabinet nimbyism and Tilbury: https://icba.ca/bc-blog/icba.ca-op/ed-cabinet-nimbyism-yet-another-ndp-hurdle-to-b.c.-prosperity
The Province's Tilbury decision: https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2026ECS0043-000870
Why activists are targeting LNG: https://energynow.ca/2026/07/the-new-target-why-anti-oil-and-gas-activists-are-making-canadian-lng-not-pipelines-their-next-major-target/
Fraser River Tunnel procurement and federal funding: https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2026TT0066-000796

ICBA Coffee & Construction drops every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe, hit the bell, and send this one to somebody who builds for a living.

ICBA is Canada's largest construction association — the voice of B.C. and Alberta's open-shop builders: https://icba.ca

#construction #bcpoli #BritishColumbia #forestry #LNG #Delta #PrinceGeorge #housing #ICBA

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 hall — California callers who'd never been to Vancouver, AI-written scripts, "translators" who didn't speak the language, and a hotel union president defending it all. Real Vancouver families waited until 1 a.m. for their five minutes. Mayor Sim wants a Vancouver Charter fix — will David Eby move on it?

🖥️ The data centre race: New York slaps a one-year moratorium on hyperscale data centres, the federal NDP wants Canada to copy it — and Alberta scoops up 92% of everything planned in this country. Vancouver? Come back in 2027.

🏠 CMHC's mid-year forecast: housing starts keep falling, with B.C. and Ontario condos wearing the worst of it. What that means for framing crews, excavators and every builder's 2027

🌉 Charlottetown wrap: tariffs bite August 19, "everything is on the table" — and Carney gets caught in his own spin on the Gordie Howe Bridge deal

📊 Get the ICBA Economics briefing — the most helpful email you'll get all week: https://icba.ca/economics

Read more on today's stories:
Dan Fumano on Vancouver council going off the rails: https://vancouversun.com/opinion/colu...
The California callers and Sim's letter to Eby: https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/unite...
New York's data centre moratorium: https://thehub.ca/2026/07/20/new-york...
CMHC's 2026 mid-year Housing Market Outlook: https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/media-new...
Carney on the Gordie Howe Bridge deal: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carn...

ICBA Coffee & Construction drops every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe, hit the bell, and send this one to somebody who builds for a living.

ICBA is Canada's largest construction association — the voice of B.C. and Alberta's open-shop builders: https://icba.ca

#construction #bcpoli #abpoli #Vancouver #BritishColumbia #Alberta #housing #datacentres #ICBA

Steel pipe, made in Canada, stacked in a yard in Prince George. This week, they started putting it in the ground. A pipeline actually getting built. Imagine that.

Episode 11 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: Enbridge kicks off the $4-billion Sunrise Expansion near Prince George — 140 km of new pipe, 2,500 workers, Canadian steel, a Lheidli T'enneh partnership at the table — and even an NDP minister showed up. Have they finally got religion on oil and gas?
⛏️ B.C. is permitting mines again: Mount Polley's tailings raise approved — a decade of industry leading on safety, and a world desperate for copper
📉 From Leader to Laggard: Jock and Ken put the numbers on the table — 223,000 missing private-sector jobs, a public payroll that's doubled, and debt on track to TRIPLE in six years
🦺 WorkSafeBC comes for the shotcrete crews — same risk should mean same rule, whether it's a truck or a hose

📊 Get the ICBA Economics briefing — the most helpful email you'll get all week: https://icba.ca/economics

Every premier in Canada is flying to Charlottetown. The Prime Minister joins them Thursday. What they decide about trade lands on your job site.

Episode 10 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: Trade week — all 13 premiers meet in Charlottetown, then sit down with Prime Minister Carney Thursday. USMCA, steel and lumber tariffs, interprovincial trade — and whether David Eby shows up with something to build
🏙️ Western Canada's TALLEST tower lands on Vancouver council's desk: Holborn's plan for 1,546 homes, a 920-room hotel and two rebuilt downtown blocks
🗳️ B.C. politics gets a fourth party — Mike Bernier takes over CentreBC, and we do the vote-split math out loud
🚧 Where the work is: DCN's July pre-bid list, plus a forecast for B.C.'s highest-ever nonresidential construction spending this year

📊 Get the ICBA Economics briefing — the most helpful email you'll get all week: https://icba.ca/economics

Every new home comes with a stack of hidden fees. Nobody shows you the receipt. Ottawa might finally make them.

Episode 9 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: Bill C-287, the Housing Cost Transparency Act — ICBA backs MP Brad Redekopp's push to make the building code system show its work: real dollar costs, published before they land in your mortgage
⚡ Shovels go in this month on the North Coast Transmission Line — and Ksi Lisims LNG keeps stacking milestones on the road to a $20-billion final investment decision
🚆 Where the work is: all eight Surrey Langley SkyTrain stations are under construction, and crews are welding rail
🏥 Kamloops gets a win — the new acute treatment area opens at Royal Inland Hospital's emergency department
🏗️ Bird Construction lands roughly $1 BILLION in new work in one announcement — nuclear, mining, energy and seven new Alberta schools

📊 Get the ICBA Economics briefing — the most helpful email you'll get all week: https://icba.ca/economics

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WorkSafeBC is holding its base rate at 1.55% for 2027 and calling it "rate stability." But the real cost of the system is 1.88% — and the gap is being covered by draining your surplus. Jordan Bateman breaks down the numbers WorkSafe doesn't want you to see, plus a break in the U.S. softwood lumber tariff and B.C.'s latest promise to speed up permits.

Alberta just landed a $13-billion Meta data centre — and built a power plant beside it so regular families don't get stuck with the bill. That's the model B.C. should copy. 

Jordan Bateman breaks down the smart way to power the AI boom, plus a fresh youth-jobs plan, and a new certification clock for crane operators.

The news that matters to the people who build British Columbia and Alberta. New every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.