CLF 2023 D1E2 | Regulation Development in Construction with Dr. Dave Baspaly (COCA) & Don Schouten (WorkSafeBC) | EP82 (Part 2)

Day 1 Episode 2 | In this episode, from the conference floor at the VRCA Construction Leadership Forum 2023, James and Christian are joined by Dr. Dave Baspaly, President & CEO of the Council of Construction Associations and Don Schouten, Senior Manager at WorkSafeBC.


EPISODE LINKS:
Dr. Dave Baspaly LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-baspaly-3507b66/
COCA Website: https://cocabc.ca/
Don Schouten LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/don-schouten-54305111/
WorkSafeBC Website: https://www.worksafebc.com/en

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the Site Visit on Buzzsprout: https://thesitevisit.buzzsprout.com/269424
the Site Visit on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-site-visit/id1456494446
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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Welcome to the Psych Visit Podcast of Leadership and Perspective from Construction with your hosts, James Falcon, and Christian Hand.

SPEAKER_02 0:55

Let's get down to it.

SPEAKER_04 1:01

We've got Dr. Dave Pispali from the Council of Construction Associations. And Don Shouten from WorksAfe PC. Right. Nailed it? You nailed it.

SPEAKER_03 1:12

Nailed it. Good.

SPEAKER_04 1:13

Guys, well, it's really great to have you on. You just finished up a session on regulations. And also, this is the funny part for us, is like and the relationship between the two of you and how they come together. Right. James kind of leans over and goes, is this adversarial at any point in time? Is this like Gotham City with Batman and uh and the Joker? Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_06 1:32

I I actually think it's more like a um start to a joke. It sounds like what does a regulator and a lobbyist do in a Roma in a bar? But uh no, we we actually uh over the years have developed a good fondness for each other, we're good friends, um, and do good work together. Honestly, you need to work those relationships to make a difference.

SPEAKER_04 1:48

Yeah, you can really see it, definitely, in the way you guys talk.

SPEAKER_05 1:51

Yeah, no, it's uh you know what it's it's so important to us to make sure that we work together and uh I mean work when when we're dealing with uh things like regulation development, it's very important for us to have that back and forth and understanding where uh from from other perspectives. So it's uh it's great.

SPEAKER_04 2:12

Really quick, then just for our audience, and then we'll get into a couple questions. Just a little quick cold notes background for you guys.

SPEAKER_06 2:18

Dave, if you want to. Yeah, no, let me hit it. Um I have a doctor in business administration, certified management consultant. I got into this by accident. I mean, I just uh I've been around construction doing work for uh oil and gas and construction. They asked me when the uh legend Grant McMillan, who was my predecessor, laughed, he tapped me on the shoulder and said, You're a lot like me, I'd like you to take over. First thing I did, hired Grant as my second. So I didn't have didn't have to do all the hard work, but uh no, it's been a real pleasure doing the work I do. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_05 2:47

Yeah, uh from my perspective, I've uh you know, I as I sat up there in the podium, I I uh spent over 20 years in the construction industry before joining Works A PC, and it it was important for me to uh I I understand construction uh uh you know, being in it for that long and bringing that inside the board with that understanding makes a big difference. What were you doing in construction? I was uh a man a general manager for a roofing company, so for for almost 20 years. Which roofing company? Uh Trans West Roofing.

SPEAKER_04 3:19

Okay, I'm trying to try because I it's just industry familiarity, maybe, but okay. I was in general contracting project management. Everybody had a hand on it. Yeah. Cool.

unknown 3:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 3:32

Oh, yeah, it makes him very credible when we're talking to our members because he's been there. Whereas I'm a lot of people that work safe PC, and I'm a rank and file, he wouldn't say this, but I will have no idea what our world looks like. And it gives us an opportunity to really have that touchstone. So in many ways, what Don does is performs a reality check when it comes to no, that's not gonna work in the real world. Right. And it works really well.

SPEAKER_04 3:53

No, that's that's a cool point to note because that'll that kind of plays into maybe a question we have uh later on here.

SPEAKER_03 3:58

But yeah, yeah, so um what we were what we try to do is trying to have like a an overarching sort of theme question here that both of you can contribute to. So we obviously understand that there's this big shortfall in terms of labor coming into uh construction over the next certain period of time. We also that has to map with you know GDP uh growth. And so we have this succession thing of the knowledge and uh experiences from the older generations being passed down to the younger generation. Now we've heard a lot of and we've seen it on site with you know some superintendents who would say something like this, just an example of, oh, we never used to do it that way. Uh-huh. And the question for you guys is with increased regulation, does that hinder the transfer of knowledge? Because they're like, you know what? I'm just kind of like, I this was a good time for me to get out. It's way too complicated now. I don't even feel like explaining what we used to do. And the knowledge goes into the ether. What do you guys think about that?

SPEAKER_06 5:06

Well, I'm gonna tell you that's a great question for starters because it actually is very multifaceted in how you might answer it. Number one, the old tradesmen, the guys on that girder that ate their lunch, didn't need somebody to tell them how to how to fall protect, how to make sure they walked off that safely. Things have changed now. We've got a young workforce that's moving so quickly into place because of labor shortage and the act, honest to god, boomerang right now. Sure. That we're we're putting people in place and having to have a fallback set of rules that everybody knows are safe. So, in in some respects, there's a lost art, the tradesmen, not women, because back in then it was a real male-dominated. We're changing all that. By by that kind of evolution, we get the best of both worlds, but we're losing a little bit of the old culture, which you know. Here's another one that you guys are familiar with yelling at people and swearing and all the things that used to be. If you knew you did something wrong on a work site, you knew you were gonna get your ass handed to you. Yeah. Today, that's bullying harassment. You're going to get written up and you're not gonna be working there anymore. And it's been an evolution for the sector, but my God, we've changed fast. I mean, you can see a lot of uh uh things around um unsafe behaviors no longer tolerated. We just did a survey on um opioids in our sector. Come out the other side on that, and everybody who answered that thing, where regardless of where you were in the sector, or you know, from administrative staff all the way through on the tools, came out the other side saying impairment is not allowed on a work site. So that's a lot of good work we've done. Now that doesn't say it doesn't happen in our sector. We've got people having the after party and celebrate the work week, etc. And there's a problem there. But on the quite the party. Yeah, we we really have a situation where we've moved the culture of safety and evolved a little bit that way. I'm a little sad that we have to have a rule for everything. I mean, to me, it's encumbering and it makes us always, you know, we're focused on rules and not looking sometimes around situationally aware of what's actually a risk.

SPEAKER_03 6:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 6:58

But in in fairness, just to end my point here, what is I think it's a progressive move uh because it does over time protect us and make us think differently than we would. We're using risk management frameworks, we're using um ways to control risk like we've never done before, and our incidents are falling. So we're obviously doing something right in that situation. And again, like I said, the other part of it's the evolution of our culture to be more welcoming, indigenous people, women in trades, really make it a holistic, uh long juveny sector now into the future.

SPEAKER_05 7:30

I guess from my perspective, uh a bit of a bit of a counter to the aspect of you know the old way of doing things with and and the aspect of regulation. I mean, I I go back a long way. Uh you know, my my father was a mason, a bricklayer, and and I mean I as a as a kid was up on scaffolds that were pretty shaky, saw horses on top of the top frame, you know, you know, hauling bricks up those scaffolds, doing that sort of thing. That's the type of thing that went on back then. And I think um, not not in all cases, but certainly, you know, safety wasn't really thought of as much back then. And I think the combination of regulation and more attention paid to it makes a difference. Um, you know, it it understanding the shift that they've talked about, but there's also a shift of, well, I know I know what I'm doing. And I think that's sometimes we fall into that trap that you know the way we used to do it is the right way. Well, it's not necessarily the right way. I mean, that's why people it is getting safer out there because we're, I mean, people are wearing harnesses, people we're we're putting proper guardrails up, we're doing the proper stuff now. And a lot of that was formulated on the basis of regulations coming to the forefront, people having to move forward and and uh and and look at that. We we do have to remember regulations are a minimum standard. So it's the minimum that you should be doing out there, and I think it makes a difference, and it has made a difference over time. So I guess from my perspective, I I look at it a bit more that way, and and having been in those situations and and looking at what's done now compared to what was done back then when there wasn't as much attention paid to it.

SPEAKER_03 9:10

So yeah, it's uh so in in terms of the you know, you're you were talking about uh you know somebody who would be um like harassment, be you know, yelled at on a job site, et cetera. I mean, we we could probably look at construction from whether or not you believe they're actually made by humans or not, the pyramids, people dragging, you know, thousands of people dragging. What kind of podcast is this? Yeah, I know it's that's the breakout podcast. Yeah, get out the whiskey. No. Um so there's this whole thing that men used to do this from back in time to today. And we have this uh, you know, there are I we watched this, there's this Netflix TV show about uh super skyscrapers that I watched. And you see these uh, and it was the building of the new World Trade Center, right? The one World Trade Center. And they had these these guys, because they were all guys that were in the scene, um, that were holding with the strength of their arms the panels from the from the crane that were being caught by the wind. Right. These glass light panels that were all the aluminum was all in there, and they had to lock, they had this locking mechanism in place. So there is this kind of, I guess, uh it's like a it's like a football team, right? Like whether or not it has men or women in it, you have your linebackers who are there to push the other team away. And then you have the other ones who are like, you know, uh a quarterback who can be more lean and can run and can go throw and just and they don't get tackled.

SPEAKER_07 10:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:41

But there is these roles that unfortunately take the muscle strength of men to do. And so the question is, is that are is there a um as we go through regulations and we go through trying to equalize everything, is there a point where we can um reality uh if this is a word, realitalize that's a good new word. You know what I mean? Or like be no, but to be in reality, the reality eyes or whatever. I don't know, there's gotta be some term for that, but to to or word, like maybe we'll make one today. Just did. But what do you guys think about that? It's it seems like such a well, everyone can do everything. Sure. But kind of not really.

SPEAKER_06 11:20

Well, let's let's talk about that because uh work is organized on pragmatics. Yeah. I mean, um, and that's construction is based on on sub trades, and subtrades are very much like your your team. Yeah, you know, drywallers come in as a group to get one function done, your framers come and do another, your electricians another, etc. etc. etc. And that building in New York, by the way, is beautiful. Yeah, I mean it's a piece of art. That's the other thing that's happening in construction. We're building beautiful buildings. We're building not so beautiful warehouses, but we're building beautiful buildings when we want to get a financer team. Yeah, I suppose so. So how do we how do we make sure uh first of all, we want to be welcoming that anybody can play in construction because quite frankly, you can now. Yeah, we have the equipment, the machinery, the uh the way to automate things that took muscles in the past, and robotics in general. There's a lot of stuff. We just need people with brains and sparks. Yeah, it can come from anywhere. True. That's so yeah. So that's one thing that's that's really good for our football team if you use that analogy. And two, the superstar on the team now. Strange as it is honestly starts to become the safety guy. Why, or girl? Because in our world now, safety is the driver for our business. If you're not safe, you're out of business. If you don't comply, goodbye. And it's the honest truth the way it is. That was our tagline in um in COVID. If you can't get it right, don't be doing it because you're gonna shut the whole sector down. And we managed to keep our rates so low because of that universal culture that we weren't gonna tolerate stupidity, we weren't gonna tolerate abuse. And WorkSave as a partner was right behind us saying, we'll give you this root room to run. You screw it up, we'll take it away. And they were a good partner in this. They actually helped us promote information and get through it. So, very much like a football team, we we are successful when we work as a team and we work well together. And even when we compete in bits, tenders, procurement, whatever we're doing, there's a kind of a solidarity that we we are a sector together whole as one thing, trying to do great things for the economy and British Columbia.

SPEAKER_04 13:13

Yeah, and we really saw that obviously during COVID, right? The industry coming together, the industry actually doing something somewhat quickly. Oh, yeah, yeah, rallying around something. So always prepared for that. Yeah. On the on the topic of speed, and we'll bring this back to the beginning of the conversation. We said the handing over of generation where less regulation, more regulation. A curious question popped into my head as you guys were up there chatting, and you said it earlier on, just the fast the the fast-paced nature of our world, but also as it relates to construction and change, and you said things are generally safer now than they were. Regulation people don't always associate with speed in terms of change. Right. Is that changing? Is there a depending on who's lobbying or what group is pushing what or what data is telling you whatever? Is regulation change getting faster or unnecessarily? That one you answer. I'll follow that one.

SPEAKER_05 14:01

Well, I I think what's important, and we talked about it up there, is you know, we can we can move things forward fast. That can be done with anything.

SPEAKER_04 14:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 14:10

The key and what we discussed up there was making sure that there's ability for consultation, which takes time. I mean, going and switching a regulation and just you know, us writing something without consulting with somebody, that'll move it along pretty quick.

SPEAKER_03 14:26

But no advocacy is the problem. Well, it's not a good thing. You have to have everybody together.

SPEAKER_05 14:29

Yeah, I I don't look at it as advocacy, I look at it as working together to put a product out there that is workable. I think that's the key. Um, you know, and and and us being able to have that time to consult on these types of things is important. And people getting involved is important. And I think that's that's what our big message is today is get involved, it it makes a better product. You know, don't come to us afterwards and say, Oh, I don't like that. Yeah, there's opportunity to get involved, and I and I think that's the key here.

SPEAKER_06 15:00

So no, that's good. Well, I'll just add to the fact that you asked if it's moving faster, absolutely yes. I mean, there's I mean, when when you open the box of of issues anywhere across the perimeter and you do it all at once, we're running up and down that perimeter trying to make sure we cover the board. Um there's a imperative by governments to get in now to get their mandates implemented. And that in the labor ministry, that can mean a whole bunch of things. And it has huge pressure on works at PC. Now, I come back to a rank and file, people out there doing the work. I get phone calls from people that are absolutely out of their mind by regulations that don't make sense. How come I gotta sit through a two-hour workshop on how to wear a hard hat? I mean, that's just ludicrous. Makes no sense. I mean, I put it on, I know when I have to put it on. That's not a regulation, by the way, but some of the training that comes in there supports a secondary industry that just builds safety on top of safety, which we have 10 guys watching one person work, kind of an attitude. So our job is to find the middle point, you know? Seriously, well, if people get so frustrated they don't know who next is gonna show up on site and ask them to show the paperwork. Yeah, sure. So we end up having more people doing paperwork than we do actually work on in some cases. I know that's gonna resonate with our audience. But the thing that I that I um I want to say though is our job is to balance that, to say, and and this is and Don here is one of the champions of that. Because his real world experience, he can say, why? Why is that gonna make it safer? Why are we gonna have to fill out 20 pages of paperwork to identify a risk that's gonna be two seconds and there's gonna be a new risk? So is that another 20 pages of paper that needs to be generated? Or can we not agree that if we have our heads up looking around and being situationally aware and have a policy and a procedure that governs how we're gonna act in that situation, we're gonna be relatively safe. Right? We land that reasonably, the worker's gonna go, that seems reasonable to me. And it's gonna be it's gonna make sense. And that's all we're trying to do with through this stuff. And there's so much of it to go through to do it. But on a balance, WorkSafeBC is one of the better uh regulatory agencies across all jurisdictions because they have made it an imperative to consult and be transparent. Not always, but in most cases, they're willing to listen and hear what the changes are.

SPEAKER_04 17:04

Well, to be cognizant of just time, and these are these are quick little windows of interviews. We obviously have lots to dig into, and it'd be fun to do some breakout, a breakout session with either of you guys or together again. The way you guys work together and talk together, it's it's pretty cool. It's fun to watch. That's cool. Yeah, yeah. No one has ever said that before? No, we didn't. It's sort of like a Batman and Robin version. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 17:27

Yeah. Yeah, no.

SPEAKER_04 17:28

But we always end with certain questions on our podcast. We'll frame it more around the conversation here in this conference. We're at the construction leader forum by the VRCA up here in Whistler. We've got men and women in construction that are building this industry, yeah, keeping people safe. What is one thing that you guys would suggest, just a nugget from each of you, maybe, about advocating for safety or for different regulation. What's one nugget you can leader by the way?

SPEAKER_06 17:54

Well, I'll I'll hit it first and because these these questions always need a minute to compose yourself. But I'm ready to go. The number one thing that is is that if it affects you, get involved. Don't be passive. There's a nature, there's a there's a thing that kind of goes into our minds where we say somebody else has got that, I don't like it. They should really deal with that. Can't existentialize it. If it's gonna be something that's gonna be in your world, that's gonna shake your world, get involved and make a change. You don't have to spend all your time on it. As I gave up on the on the podium today, some real world ways you can do it that are low touch, or you can even tap somebody like myself or PRCA on the shoulder and say, look, you guys gotta fight for this. And honestly, again, that's how we make those changes that actually make the world make sense. I think that's what I'd recommend. People just don't be passive in this world, get involved. Nice, well said. Nice.

SPEAKER_05 18:39

I'll I'll just go a a bit different in in the fact of uh I look at uh I want to make sure people understand that, or or at least they should be looking at safety, uh not as a bolt-on to their business, but as part of their business. It's it's what they do, it's what you need to do, it's part of the culture, it's part of the circumstance. It's not because there's a regulation. You shouldn't be doing it because of a regulation. You should be doing it to make sure workers are safe. It makes for good business, it makes for, you know, it makes a difference in your business. So that's the kind of nugget I would leave behind is make safety part of the job, not a bolt-on piece.

SPEAKER_04 19:19

Well said, guys, really well said. Again, a great duo. Well, that's what we're doing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 19:25

And if you're curious who's Batman, I'm just joking. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 19:29

Um pleasure, guys. Absolutely. Thank you. Nope, that's it. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for both coming on here. And uh wish you all the best. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Or your drive home. Yeah, you betcha.

SPEAKER_06 19:40

Sounds like we've got uh we've got safety to save, I guess. We'll be out in the field doing it. Enjoy the rest of the day, you guys. It's a great conference. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_03 19:51

Well, that does it for another episode of the type of. Thank you for listening. Be sure to stay connected with us by following our social account on Instagram and YouTube. You can also sign up for our multi-minute app at command, where you'll get enterprise and type of protest and everything you need to know about the type of the podcast and the type of type of construction management tool of choice for thousands of contractors in North America and beyond. All right, let's get back to building the city.