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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 2, 2020

Regina Bypass Partners Awarded SCSA’s Inaugural President’s Award

 

REGINA – The Saskatchewan Construction Safety Association (SCSA) today announced The Regina Bypass Partners team is the recipient of the association’s Inaugural President’s Award for Outstanding Safety Leadership.

With more than five million hours of construction over four years on the newly constructed Regina Bypass and only one time-loss incident, SCSA President Colin Pullar says Regina Bypass Partners was the perfect fit for the new award. The project’s safety record, however, is not the main reason for recognizing the partners with the award, Pullar admits.

“Beyond the incredible safety record, it was the fact that that as a team, they learned how to become more innovative, how to plan exceptionally well, and how to build an effective team,” Pullar said. “They had thousands of people and hundreds of contractors that all had to work from the same song sheet. When that came together, they really started to see great performance, and safety was one of the most recognizable elements of that success. We really wanted to recognize the leadership team for this particular project because there were some fascinating results.”

The SCSA’s President’s Award is presented to an individual or company with exceptional involvement in the promotion and practice of construction safety and recognizes outstanding efforts and work that advances the betterment of safety practices province-wide. The winner also demonstrates excellent safety practices and outstanding leadership in construction. The SCSA’s President’s Award will not necessarily be presented annually, but rather under certain circumstances.

“The SCSA presents the President’s Award in unique circumstances to teams that have done something extraordinary – not so much the size of a project, but the complexity of it,” Pullar said. “Building bridges and roads doesn’t sound complex, but in this case, the complexity came from the size, the scope, the visibility of the project, the politics, and of course, the sheer number of partners, contractors, and workers. I think this was a great display of the types of things that others can aspire to.”

Pullar said there are also other parts of that project that make the Regina Bypass Partners deserving of the award: the team was able to get the project completed on budget and ahead of time. He also noted that Regina Bypass Project Director and Graham Construction Human Resources VP Allisdair Dickinson was a key driver in the project’s ultimate success.

“Allisdair was the person who really engaged and said I am championing this project.

He lead the meetings, he was the supervisor, and while he had a large budgets to look after, he always made people the centre of it acknowledging, if we don't get this right, the rest of it will fail,” Pullar noted. “He really understood that safety is an integration between really strong business and the importance of people. You cannot have one without the other.”