bcbusiness.ca July 2015 BCBusiness 105
Such early scouting makes sense
when considering the full scope of BC
Hydro's most important capital proj-
ects, many of which are in remote val-
leys in rural districts. Where Hydro
operates close to cities, its pool of poten-
tial employees—electricians, power-
line technicians, cable splicers and
engineers—is large thanks to schools
like the British Columbia Institute of
Technolog y a nd
Kwantlen Polytech-
nic University. But
up north, home of
some of BC Hydro's
h i g h e s t - b u d g e t
projects, there are
fewe r qu a l i f ie d
workers for hire.
For capital projects
l i ke t he Nor t h-
West Transmission
Line,a $74-million
line betwee Skeena
Substation and a
n e w s u b s t a t i o n
ne a r B ob Q u i n n
L a ke i n t he f a r
n o r t h , f i n d i n g
qualified workers
is tough, meaning
often they come
from the Lower
Mainland instead.
A related challenge for BC Hydro
is that, in recent years, B.C. has
lagged at turning trainee apprentices
into qualified tradespeople. A 2004
shakeup of B.C.'s apprenticeship pro-
grams made employers responsible
for a bigger share of training. Those
changes correlated with a dramatic
fall in the percentage of apprentices
who went on to join the workforce:
from 53 per cent in 1995 to 34 per cent
in 2013. With fewer apprentices mak-
ing their way through the system, and
worries that future projects would
tighten supply, BC Hydro launched
its own trades school in 2013—a proj-
ect that was years in the making. The
company budgeted $20 million for
the new Trades and Technical Train-
ing School in Surrey to train around a
hundred new recruits a year, in addi-
tion to the roughly 400 apprentices
on payroll. About one hundred have
graduated so far.
■
HYDRO
ASSeTS
77,000 km
of transmission lines
300
substations
900,000
untility poles
325,000
transformers
