Clive Thurston of the Ontario General Contractors Association (OGCA) and Sandra Skivsky of the National Trade Contractors Coalition of Canada (NTCCC) locked horns for years during negotiations over prompt payment but today they are partners seeking to extend fair payment rules across the country.
Thurston, president of the OGCA, and Skivsky, NTCCC chair and director of marketing and business development at the Canada Masonry Centre, were in Toronto participating in a panel discussion Dec. 7 where they stressed that the tensions that have long existed between trade contractors and general contractors are behind them.
Now, with prompt payment incorporated into Ontario’s new Construction Act, they are allied against owners in other jurisdictions across Canada who continue to resist.
People need to be paid and money needs to flow, said Skivsky.
“We now work together around the country,” she said. “We are working in every province to ensure reasonable, good and fair legislation comes about.”
Trade contractors were instrumental in forcing the Ontario government to pay attention to prompt payment, said Skivsky, first targeting Ontario for advocacy efforts in 2011 — where, she said, she sparred with Thurston across the table — and then fighting for prompt payment through then Liberal MPP Steven Del Duca’s private member’s bill in 2013.
The bill failed but the trade contractors had made their point, said Skivsky.
“Without the trade contractors screaming and yelling, and the government taking us seriously, nobody wanted to touch this,” she said.
In the end, Skivsky noted, without support from the general contractors, “We don’t think we could have pushed this across the goal line.”
Thurston said the close collaboration between construction stakeholders as reforms to the Construction Lien Act were developed has led to more co-operation in the sector.
The prompt payment and adjudication provisions in the new act will drive better behaviour as stakeholders aim to resolve differences before they end up in adjudication, he said, and owners will improve their business practices as they work to make payments in 28 days.
“It is no longer acceptable for people to say the person who cuts the cheque is on vacation,” said Thurston.
The alliances forged in Ontario should serve as lessons in other jurisdictions, Skivsky argued.
“This is such a natural collaboration,” she said. “They work together and fight together but at the end of the day they have to build the damn building.”
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