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CANADIAN INDUSTRY ONLINE - JUNE 2013
To be frank, this means that some-
times the work that we’ve done looks
shoddy, at best, and I can’t accept that.
CIO:
How is the labour shortage
contributing to these issues?
GB:
Throw in the labour issue we
are facing in Alberta right now, and
you can see that the industry is facing
a lot of problems.
The biggest challenge is the in-
consistency of available work here in
this part of Alberta. We can offer work
sometimes for only two months of the
year, so why would workers come here
when they can go work in the oil sands
full time? We need to solve this issue.
CIO:
We need to talk about how
you’re dealing with the media back-
lash to pipelines. How is that hurting
Stratus, and how can this be changed
so that the industry can continue thriv-
ing?
GB:
There isn’t any question
we’ve been feeling the pressure, but
to be frank, the negativity is not some-
thing we all understand. A lot of the
decisions about pipelines, they are be-
ing made a long way away, in a board-
room somewhere, by people who have
never seen a pipeline, or how it’s built.
That in itself is an issue—people that
make the bigger decisions need to un-
derstand our industry better.
Part of my job as a manager in
this business is to go around the coun-
try in look at the areas where we’ve
built a line. We built these pipelines in
the winter, and after the spring thaw,
everything was melted—showing
messy conditions and a lot of run-off.
After several years of doing this, I re-
alized I wasn’t proud of this and de-
cided to make a change. This process
happens most of the time outside the
media, and no one in the past really
looked that far into it.
But now, the pipeline construc-
tion industry can recognize it needs to
do better, and make change, whether
in the construction process or in how
we deal with the environment.
CIO:
How have you contributed
to that change?
RG:
The real changes began af-
ter I met with a very passionate. He
showed me what needed to be done,
and we talked openly and honestly
about the negatives and positives of
what we were doing.
The key here is that everyone,
from the construction companies to the
producers, to the politicians making
decisions far away from the oil fields,
they are all afraid to accept some li-
ability. But it was my open discussions
with this inspector that made me real-
ize that we can start these changes.
We tend in the oil industry to talk
around things, rather than say what’s
what. Everyone in the pipeline indus-
try would really like to see changes,
but they’re afraid to make those chang-
es because then they’d have to admit
that there was a better way. They be-
lieve that there will be an automatic
assumption that they’re doing wrong,
when really; everyone has been work-
ing towards the minimum standard set
out for this industry. Meeting the mini-
mum is where everyone has been driv-
ing their products.
When it comes down to it, legisla-
tion is not necessarily the thing that is
going to get you to the best standard—
it will drive you to the best minimum
acceptable quality—whether it’s in
housing construction or pipelines. A
great analogy is golf.
Perfection, in golf, is the 4-inch
hole in the middle of the green. At the
beginning of the game everyone is
striving toward that goal. Now, in or-
der to speed up play and get everyone
through there will be a 3-foot circle
drawn around that whole, and every-
one begins to strive for that. By the end
of the game—people accept shots that
land all over the place, and everyone
has taken away their focus from the
perfection of that 4-inch hole.
CIO:
Does the labour shortage
you’re dealing with impact your abil-
ity to do better?
STRATUS PIPELINES
