BMCC Launches New Website

The Building Material Council of Canada (BMCC), the Association that represent our interests on the national stage, has been busy!

The Leadership Summit last year found that what members most want from their national association is a unified voice on the national stage, one that enhances the image of the industry and helps to address our broad workforce and HR issues. To that end, BMCC decided to embark on a campaign to develop positive relationships with a key stakeholder of our members’ continued success in Canada: the federal government.

BMCC has been putting the building blocks of a campaign to engage with the Government in place. It’s our plan to connect with individual members of Parliament, both government and opposition, in order to ensure that key players understand the importance of our industry as an employer, a generator of economic activity, and as a positive presence in communities across Canada. With 2,400 members that are employers in federal ridings across the country, we have a powerful lever to use when engaging with the federal government!

So, one of the key building blocks we have been working on is a mapping exercise. BMCC has been working with the regional associations to build out our understanding of our political footprint, mapping our stores and employment numbers to political ridings and analyzing where best to develop a caucus of support for our industry.

And, of course, we’ve had to get a website (two in fact) up and running! We recently got our main BMCC website completed (http://www.bmcc-ccmc.ca). It provides a shared platform to present the strong and unified voice of our industry. We’ve also been working on our Building Supply Careers initiative, with its own website, to address the chronic shortage of qualified employees faced by our members.

To this same end, in late 2017, as Sears was beginning to close its stores, the BMCC reached out to Sears Canada’s employees to ask them to consider a career in the building materials industry. Working with the Sears organization’s national HR, the BMCC was able to have a poster put up in Sears stores across the country, letting Sears employees know about the good middle-class jobs we have available, well suited to people who have worked in the retail sector.

Another key building block we are working on is our ‘ask.’ What do we need to take position on as an industry at the national level to advance our members’ interests? How can we best align with the Government, so that they understand that helping our industry helps them to advance their own agenda? We’ve been analyzing the Government’s Budget 2017 commitments with regard to housing affordability, green housing, employment, and tax fairness and will be building national positions on an eco-rebate for green housing; employment in the building material sector; fair treatment of bricks and mortar versus online; and interchange fees.

We would love to hear from you about other national issues on which you think we should be taking position!