Chief Human Resources Officer / Canada
Apprentices, peer supporters and a crew that now calls stop
- Company revenue
- C$1.12bn
- Brenmarrow Civil Constructors, 2025
- Peak workforce
- 2,840
- Summer 2025; 2,010 hourly tradespeople
- Registered apprentices
- 212
- On our payroll, June 2026
Decisions & consequences
01Hiring apprentices for a British Columbia guideway package instead of flying in Ontario crews
In early 2022 our Surrey office was awarded a C$238 million package of guideway and station structures on a transit line in the Lower Mainland. At peak it needed about 150 carpenters and labourers. The regional market was short of experienced formwork carpenters, and the project director proposed sending 60 travelling carpenters from Ontario on living-away allowances, at an estimated C$7.8 million over thirty months. His concern was reasonable: experienced crews carried less productivity risk on a structure with a fixed completion date.
I proposed that we hire 48 apprentices onto our own payroll, train them in a ten-week pre-site programme, and assign 24 designated journeyperson mentors at a premium of C$4 an hour, with no more than two apprentices each. Eleven of the apprentices came through an employment and training commitment that the project owner had agreed with First Nations near the alignment. Estimating calculated that lower productivity during the first year could cost about C$2.1 million.
The chief executive chose a mixed plan: all 48 apprentices plus 25 travelling carpenters instead of 60. We accepted a margin reduction of about 0.9 percentage points on the package and a period in which the project director carried more schedule risk than he wanted.
Formwork productivity ran 7% below estimate for nine months before reaching it. Travelling costs were C$3.1 million rather than C$7.8 million. Thirty-nine apprentices completed their first year, and 31 were still employed by us in June 2026, including seven of the eleven who came through the owner's commitment. The British Columbia office now has a local carpentry pipeline that did not exist in 2021.
What I would do differently is protect the mentors. I set their production expectations at the normal level, assuming the premium covered the teaching. Within six months four mentors had asked to step back, and two apprentices had to change crews. I should have reduced their production quota from the first day and told the estimators why.
Opening confidential counselling to everyone on our sites after a foreman's death
In February 2021 a formwork foreman who had worked with us for twenty-two years died by suicide. His crew had seen him struggle and did not know where to turn. Our assistance programme existed, but hourly workers rarely used it, and many assumed that anything said to a company-funded service could reach their supervisor or affect their recall after a layoff.
I proposed four changes: train one peer supporter for roughly every twenty workers on our major sites; move counselling to an outside provider that reports only aggregate usage; open it to everyone working on our sites, including subcontractor crews; and continue access for six months after a seasonal layoff. The annual cost was estimated at C$680,000.
The chief financial officer questioned paying for support that union benefit plans already offered to many members. Two union business managers were wary for a different reason: they feared that disclosures might be used in discipline or in decisions about who was recalled. Some superintendents objected to a fifteen-minute monthly toolbox talk on mental health during production weeks. We agreed in writing with the unions that the company would receive no individual information, and the chief executive approved the budget.
We trained 96 peer supporters in 2021 and 2022. In 2024 the provider recorded 1,320 counselling sessions, about 38% of them with hourly tradespeople. In our anonymous survey, the share of hourly workers who said they would tell a foreman or peer they were struggling rose from 31% in 2021 to 54% in 2025. I do not claim the programme prevented a particular death; the data cannot show that.
We gave up the ability to track individual outcomes, which some directors found uncomfortable. I would do two things differently. I would have included spouses and families from the start, as they often see trouble first. I would also have built support for the peer supporters themselves; two stepped down in the first year after difficult conversations they carried alone.
Pausing crane lifts so that workers on closed permits would report hazards
In April 2024, on a wastewater plant upgrade in the Lower Mainland, a wall form panel slipped during a crane lift and landed in an area that had been cleared minutes earlier. Nobody was hurt. The investigation, led by our vice-president of health and safety, found that two workers had noticed a damaged lifting point that morning and said nothing. Both belonged to a crew of 22 finishers and labourers working for us on employer-specific work permits.
Interviews through interpreters explained the silence. Several workers believed that a complaint could end their employment and with it the permit that allowed them to remain in Canada. Nobody had told them so, but nobody had told them otherwise in a language they read comfortably.
The safety vice-president and I recommended pausing all crane lifts on the site for three shifts, repeating orientation for every worker in English, Punjabi, Tagalog and Spanish, opening an outside reporting line in those languages, and giving each permit holder a signed letter stating that reporting a hazard would never affect their employment or our support for permit renewals. The project director opposed the pause because the owner's schedule carried daily penalties. Some superintendents felt the permit holders were being singled out, so we retrained the entire site rather than one crew.
The pause and standby cost about C$520,000; the owner granted one day of schedule relief. Hazard reports from the permit-holding crew rose from three in the six months before the incident to 27 in the six months after. In November 2024 one of those workers stopped a lift because of a frayed sling. Since then 14 of the 22 have become permanent residents with our support as their employer, and six have moved to other employers without objection from us.
What I would change is the timing. We should have asked how these workers understood their position when we hired them, rather than discovering it after a panel fell.