May 1, 2026
“NO DAY IS TYPICAL.”
For many people, that’s part of the appeal of operating cranes, according to apprentice Julien Klynsoon.
“I don’t think it’s what most people expect, right? A lot of people see crane operating as kind of an easy, cushy job,” he said.
The 22-year-old is a second-generation mobile crane operator, following in his father’s career in the same trade. He got into the trades right out of high school, and his handful of years of experience since then have come with both challenges and accomplishments.
“It’s a lot of long hours and a lot of sacrifice. But I definitely enjoy it. And it’s a good kickstarter to start my life,” Klynsoon said. “Every day’s different. That’s why a lot of people like it.”
Those long hours can start early in the day, at least for mobile crane operators — Klynsoon often starts his day at 5:30 a.m. in the yard to get the crane in place and ready for operation by the time everyone else gets onsite by 7 a.m.
And every day brings its own obstacle.
“There’s always something going wrong,” Klynsoon said. “It’s not a piece of equipment you can just chuck anybody in. I wasn’t even trusted to go out onto the sites for my first year.”
He spent that first year getting used to being around cranes and learning the equipment by greasing and cleaning them, while seeing how the more experienced crane operators work together.
“I certainly think doing a proper schooling and certification, just having time around the machines, is important,” Klynsoon said.
He’s not alone in thinking that — and it’s why many in the trade are celebrating the B.C. government’s new funding for enforcement of that certification.
For RKM Crane Services Ltd. general manager Matthew Blackwell, it’s been a long time coming. And it’s a far cry from when he first started in construction in the 1990s.
“I showed up on a jobsite, and there was a tower crane there. ‘Oh, great, you can go and rig that tower crane. You’re young and fit. You can chase the crane around.’ So, no training there on how to rig them safely,” Blackwell said, adding his experience was a common one at that time.
After some time, he saw a path to become a certified operator through the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 115.
“I realized that there’s a better way, and through training and, obviously, work experience, you start making much safer decisions,” he said.
The province has required crane operator certification since the late 2010s. Still, Bryan Railton, business manager for IUOE Local 115, said there has been a “disconnect between enforcement and the necessity to become fully certified.”
That started in 2001 with sweeping deregulation of the trades by the BC Liberals.
“We certainly were a casualty of that,” Railton said.
“We were going in a certain direction in the late ’90s, and then in 2001, the cut in funding was — to put it mildly, it was a bit astronomical.”
It’s not that there was a certification requirement before 2001, he noted, but rather that there were fewer tools to ensure crane operators were certified.
“The BC Liberal government of that day had gone out of its way to not just deregulate the construction industry, but change the labour code to prevent unions from organizing, to make it far more difficult for us to do our jobs in representing our members,” he said.
And in that time, the unionization rates in the trades dropped substantially in B.C. While most provinces have seen declines in unionization rates over the last quarter century, none has been as dramatic as B.C., according to Statistics Canada.
And nearly all that decline came in the first half of the BC Liberals’ 14-year reign.
And that has consequences for safety and certification requirements, Railton noted.
“When the industry was largely unionized, there were certified crane operators, but they were only certified through the union. The union enforced it. The union kept track of their members’ certification,” he said.
The deregulation of the early 2000s has taken decades to reverse for crane operators, that began to change around 2007, when the IUOE pushed the government to require certifications.
And that was through effectively guilting the government into creating the requirement through what Railton said should be common sense.
“The argument that we were putting forward in those days was [that] you have to have a licence to drive a motor vehicle, including a moped over a certain CC level,” he said.
But no licence was required to run a crane that moves heavy materials hundreds of feet overhead.
“Nobody knew that was the case prior to that,” he said.
Even with that common-sense argument, the push for certification requirements wasn’t easy.
“It took a ton of lobbying during a period where we certainly weren’t the favoured lobbyists of the day. We certainly did not have the ear of government during this time,” Railton said.
But even with that change, which required certification in the late 2000s, Railton said it has been challenging to enforce.
“You may have a job site where you have more B-ticket operators than you would have A-ticket operators running cranes,” he said.
“The supervision level came into question. The actual assessment of the apprentices and their training plan to take them from their B-ticket to their A-ticket, all of those things were lacking.”
That is where skilled trades certification comes in.
More than two decades after the BC Liberals’ sweeping deregulation that, among other things, abolished the compulsory trades, the B.C. government brought the regime back in December 2023 through skilled trades certification. At that time, seven trades were on the list, including electricians, steamfitters/pipefitters, gasfitters and sheet metal workers, among others.
Crane operators are set to be part of the second wave of designated trades, and that comes with certain assurances.
For one, it sets a maximum ratio of two apprentices per journey on a jobsite. It also includes additional funding for WorkSafeBC’s enforcement.
Though it’s been a long push to get to this point, Blackwell said momentum is now firmly in the right direction.
“The changes are coming fast, and much needed,” he said.
That includes a change that took effect in October 2024, requiring crane operators to submit a notice of project, which involved a meeting two to three weeks before crane activity.
It’s especially important, Blackwell said, given the size of B.C.’s construction industry. WorkSafeBC counted 350 to 400 cranes operating in the province in late 2024.
And that amount of activity, paired with a lack of safety regulations, has had tragic results, including a 2021 crane collapse that killed five people in Kelowna. And in February 2024, a crane’s load at Vancouver’s Oakridge project fell and killed Yuridia Flores.
“Accidents are quite frequent on jobsites, but to the scope and scale where a crane is involved, and it’s a recurring theme, it’s really taken the forefront with the construction safety as a whole. The eyes are definitely on the crane sector,” Blackwell said.
“When you have that much construction going on, limited personnel training, all of those things just factor into the potential for an accident to the magnitude that we’ve seen.”
Designating crane operators for skilled trades certification will also come with funding for training. And Blackwell sees a difference in the generation of crane operators who get training through RKM or IUOE Local 115, noting that it was sorely lacking when he got his start in the industry.
“The opportunity to have a good teacher and a good company to work with, where safety and training is key versus those that haven’t had it, you can absolutely see that [difference],” Blackwell said.
But the incentive is to skip years of training and immediately get a well-paying job as a crane operator in an under-regulated landscape.
Operating a tower crane from hundreds of feet above the ground, Blackwell said, requires a “real respect for what you’re doing when you’re up there.”
And operating a crane comes with a lot of pressure, according to Klynsoon — especially when you’re young. Something he’s gained from his training is the confidence to ensure the right protocols are followed.
“You’re getting asked to do 100 different things by all these different people, and they’re all trying to meet a deadline… people are trying to rush you, and people are trying to get you to do things that are maybe unsafe,” he said.
“And you’ve gotta have confidence in yourself to be able to either stand your ground or look for a solution to the issue. And it’s a lot of critical thinking and problem-solving.”
That crane operators would become a designated trade in B.C. was never written in stone — even under the BC NDP, it’s taken eight years to get to this point.
Railton wasn’t sure he’d ever see the day.
“I do applaud David Eby and the BC NDP for getting this over the finish line,” Railton said.
On March 3rd, at the BC Building Trades convention, the Minister of Labour announced legislation mandating a crane licensing and permitting program through WorkSafeBC which will further strengthen safety in the industry.
“It’s taken a lot of work to get here. And by a lot of work, I mean literally two generations of folks to get us to this point,” Railton said.
“I’m certainly happy to see that our forefathers’ work through the ’80s and ’90s, early 2000s has finally come to fruition.”
By Dustin Godfrey