September 2014 Faces of the Oilsands Maneuvering the sectors place in the global community By Melanie Collison and Deborah Jaremko CLAC promotes the trades with young people and strongly supports the use of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) when other options have been exhausted. Because TFWs tend to be experienced and skilled, CLAC wants to see them used to train Canadians new to the industry. “It’s good for the economy and industry. We think it’s the right thing to do; however, when we use TFWs, we should be inviting them to stay,” Prins says, circling back to his interest in predictability and enduring stability for workers and the industry. Leading labour, improving lives: Wayne Prins represents the interests of more than 11,000 oilsands workers Growing up on a farm, Wayne Prins developed a belief in hard work and dedication to a goal. “You cannot take anything for granted,” he says. “Whatever industry you’re working in, you have to work hard.” Those farm lessons inform the way Prins manages the affairs of the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC) as the union’s prairies director. Appointed to the position in November 2010, Prins is responsible for CLAC’s work in Alberta, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. He moved to Fort McMurray in 2004, opening an office as CLAC’s first representative in the region. Almost 11,000 of CLAC’s 27,000 members work in the oilsands today. Uncertainty underlies the trades, Prins says, just as it underlies farming. For the individual, the challenge is not knowing where the next job is going to come from. For the union, an apparent abundance of work can vanish. Escalating costs can push a project right off the drawing board, no matter how much investment has been poured into it, as with Total E&P Canada Ltd.’s recent cancellation of its Joslyn mining project. “Unions are under pressure to ensure members share in [the industry’s] prosperity; however, in an increasing way we are required to balance that with our competitive position in the global market. Investment decisions are made in boardrooms thousands of miles from here,” Prins says. “Our jobs depend on continued investment. Everybody has an interest in predictability or stability, whether you are an owner, a contractor or an individual member.” The thinking about productivity, he explains, has therefore moved from analyzing the productivity of front-line construction workers on an hourly basis to evaluating capital effectiveness in a global context. “That includes all the decisions made from conception to commissioning and start-up. Labour plays a huge role in that for the sake of continued opportunity for years to come,” Prins says. CLAC’s role is to optimize its members’ performance so they can rightly claim a share of the prosperity. “That does not mean simply working harder in the field. It means fostering a belief in our work as a profession,” Prins says. “Professionals don’t just not show up for work or quit their job right before the end of a project. It’s practical expectations we’re trying to foster.” Labour shortages are a persistent challenge in certain trades. CLAC works on training and workforce integration with Women Building Futures and with aboriginal communities. It promotes the trades with young people and strongly supports the use of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) when other options have been exhausted. Because TFWs tend to be experienced and skilled, CLAC wants to see them used to train Canadians new to the industry. “It’s good for the economy and industry. We think it’s the right thing to do; however, when we use TFWs, we should be inviting them to stay,” Prins says, circling back to his interest in predictability and enduring stability for workers and the industry. Now 33, Prins got into construction while he was earning his degree in environmental studies and business administration at The King’s University College, a Christian university, and he started at CLAC straight out of school. “In the DNA of the organization, Christianity is prominent, but in the secular industry, it’s not there overtly,” he says. “It’s what informs our principles, but you’ll never hear it discussed in the work we do with our members.” From the union’s founding in 1952, Prins says it has maintained a commitment to cooperative labour relations among the union, members and employers, focusing on creating a positive work environment. “What makes me really excited about the work I do is I really do have the opportunity to make the lives of our members better through good contracts, profitable employment [and] protection for their families.” Financing transformation: Leo de Bever has a goal -- to create AOSTRA 2 Leo de Bever, chief executive officer of the Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo), has just brought in all-time record earnings of $2.1 billion for the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund. The $17.5-billion Heritage Fund is the best known of the 27 Alberta pension, endowment and government funds AIMCo manages. Together they’re worth upwards of $75 billion. As the first chief executive officer of the Crown corporation, which was formed in 2008, de Bever has overhauled the province’s money management bureaucracy into a competitive organization where people are allowed to take risks. “You have to be willing to make mistakes because it’s the only way you’re going to ferret out truly exceptional opportunities,” he tells Oilsands Review. De Bever has led his team to add $23 billion in total return and built a reputation as the best money manager in Canada. It came as a surprise, then, when AIMCo’s outgoing board of directors announced last spring it was seeking a successor to the 66-year-old de Bever in order to tie the leadership transition to its own. His response? He calmly says, “I’ve always done what I thought needed doing, in whatever capacity I was able to do so.” He’ll carry on growing the business until his replacement is chosen, then continue as an adviser while focusing on the project closest to his heart—creating a far-sighted organization to finance transformational technologies in the oilsands. Alberta can go from being a high-cost energy producer to one of the lowest, he says, but it needs to move fast to adopt new technologies that slash the critical sector’s environmental footprint. Oilsands operators are good at improving the technologies they employ, but it’s difficult for them to introduce disruptive breakthroughs whose commercial viability could be 20 years out. The province needs to compress the traditional time span for technological transformation into five years, he says. De Bever’s role is to create a structure external to AIMCo, run by a separate board and management, which will invest roughly $500 million from the Heritage Fund. About half of that will be earmarked for energy technology innovation. Industry experts will vet the technologies that are proposed and could buy the results once proven. The idea has been dubbed AOSTRA 2, after the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority that pioneered a number of technologies, including steam assisted gravity drainage, through a collaboration of government, industry and research institutions. “[AIMCo has] a long investment horizon not accessible to funds who have to report every quarter. I strongly believe we’re in a position to not only move the ball forward, but make money at it,” which AIMCo is required to do, de Bever emphasizes. The technologies to be commercialized must work at a relatively small scale and must reduce energy, water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The plan has been emerging over a couple of years. The goal: to perfect new ideas outside of the mainstream. De Bever has some experience with ideas outside the mainstream, having stepped from economics into investing by successfully introducing novel categories into the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan portfolio and again at AIMCo. “What I’ve done everywhere is be an innovator because it’s the right thing to do. You cannot do extraordinary things by ordinary means,” he says. “I’m always asking, ‘Is what we’re doing today the best we can do?’ I enjoy stirring the pot and doing things differently. That keeps life interesting, and to do the right thing for my clients I may do something that is controversial.” Raised in the Netherlands, de Bever came from humble beginnings. What propels his career is insatiable curiosity and a hunger for change sparked when he arrived in North America as an 18-year-old exchange student. “The problem we have is every one of us is conditioned to extrapolate the future from the immediate past,” he says. “Change is exponential; it’s no longer linear. Bring it on.”
Posted on: Sun, 07 Sep 2014 15:29:25 +0000
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