A Single Voice

General contractors, trade contractors, and suppliers are all essential to Greater Vancouver’s billion-dollar-a-year construction industry, but their interests often conflict. Only regional associations consisting of all three groups can broker these competing interests on a day-to-day basis, and speak to the government and the wider public with one voice. One such alliance is the Vancouver Regional Construction Association.

A Single Voice, written by an industry insider, is the story of this group’s development over nine decades. The book tracks the association from its modest beginnings in the 1910s all the way into the computerized 21st century. It brings to life the construction history of Vancouver through its colourful characters, as the association struggles to become the “single voice” for an often fractious industry in the fast-growing Lower Mainland area of British Columbia.