With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1484213
READ THIS Last year, Jody Wilson-Raybould owned the holiday season with her bestselling book, Indian in the Cabinet: Speaking Truth to Power, an enlightening and at times absolutely biting recollection of her time serving as both justice minister and veterans minister for Justin Trudeau's Liberal government. She's back at it again with another effort, this one entitled True Reconciliation: How to Be a Force for Change. The main question it will answer is the one Wilson-Raybould hears most: What can I do to help advance reconciliation? The book hits shelves November 8. McClelland & Stewart, 224 pages, hardcover, $32.62 £ number of trees calculated to have been growing here when Oakridge was still an old- growth forest). And this is all unfolding on a 28-acre site at one of the busiest intersections in town. Chaos. Except for this: once you get through the gate—past the safety officer accosting people for having the wrong footwear or (horrors!) no safety vest—the place is an odd kind of sanctuary. I mean, it's no Walden Pond, but, for starters, its weirdly quiet. Yes, there are trucks and cranes, along with the constant thrum of machine noise that drives the neigh- bours crazy. But there's little shouting or banging. Turns out that it's a lot less noisy to tie rebar (the steel rods used to reinforce concrete) than it is to hammer lumber. Also—and this is obvious once you think about it—no one is running around. First of all, they can't be; the aforemen- tioned safety officers would have a coronary. But these are hourly workers moving at a measured pace. At least it seems measured until you try to keep up. Stumbling across a couple of feet of freshly tied rebar, wearing borrowed steel- toed rubber boots, I realize they're actually sprinting. Still, the key to output isn't hustle so much as effective planning and methodical ex- ecution. It begins with a daily 7 a.m. meeting of site superin- tendents, but instead of three or four attendees as you'd have on a typical high-rise project, there are up to 40 of them. You have senior superinten- dents for the biggest buildings, assistant supers representing the trades and someone whose sole role is to make sure all those cranes keep not bumping into one another. The meeting is a study in nonchalance. Everyone speaks just loudly enough to be heard by the general superintendent, who pumps up the volume if it's an update for the whole group. Then, everybody breaks into task-specific huddles, which wrap with near-military preci- sion as people disperse through the site, joining workers who have already resumed their tasks from the previous day. Still, the scale is all but un- fathomable. This is a $4.5-bil- lion project, led by Vancouver developer Westbank and fi- nanced by QuadReal, the prop- erty arm of the BCIMC, which manages all of the pension funds for B.C's public sector unions. The site excavation went into the ground five sto- reys deep, constituting 761,000 cubic metres of material; it took 54,760 dump trucks to carry it all away. Now, it comes back. On the biggest day, contractor EllisDon poured 5,000 cubic metres of concrete in one go—that parade had more than 500 cement trucks. It was for a "raft slab," the foundation of two big build- ings along 41st Avenue. They had to book every concrete plant in the city, months ahead, and complete the pour on a Sat- urday when no other work sites were competing for product. And that's the easy part. Leigh Edge from Westbank says that all they've been building so far is "the skeleton"—the concrete bones. Now, crews are starting on major mechanical components, heating and air conditioning—"the heart and lungs." And, soon, others will begin hanging the curtain-wall "skin," mostly glass cladding. Then (and by this point, the number of workers on site will have almost doubled) they'll fill in the designer interiors, installing everything from handmade Italian cabinetry to 1.125 million square feet of car- pet (most of it from 100-percent recycled material). All that will take some time. But Edge says that, by next March, "you're really going to see something" as the exteriors take shape. And, by Christmas 2024, you'll be wandering Van- couver's most beautiful new park and frolicking through the entertainment and retail pleasures of the city's second cultural hub. With enthusiasm—and just a hint of equivocation—Edge says: "That's the plan!" £ ( the informer ) G O F I G U R E Boomer or Bust While the 20,000 visitors to this fall's Seniors Living Expo at the Vancouver Convention Centre (Nov. 5–6) hint at some big business in selling to an aging population, we have some numbers to prove that B.C.'s seniors are doing well enough on their own by Melissa Edwards Last year, the number of people aged 65+ in British Columbia hit 1,000,000 for the first time Between 2016 to 2021, the share of Canadians in their senior years grew 6X faster than those under the age of 15 YEAR THAT B.C. SCRAPPED ITS MANDATORY RETIREMENT POLICY: 2008 Average age of retirement in Canada: 64.4 For entrepreneurs: 67.6 INCREASE SINCE 2001: Canadian average: 2.9 years Entrepreneurs: 2.1 years There are 31 Canadians over 65 for every 100 in the 20–64 age group By 2035, the ratio will be at least 39:100 A RECORD 1/5 WORKING- AGE CANADIANS ARE WITHIN 10 YEARS OF RETIREMENT AGE 16 BCBUSINESS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2022 20.3% OF THE TOTAL POPULATION