Walk into any oil refinery, pulp mill or power plant in Canada and look around. The pressure vessels, structural steel, piping and welded connections you see did not assemble themselves. Someone built them. In most cases, that someone spent years learning a trade that most Canadians have never heard of — and would struggle to describe if they had.
Robert MacIntosh of Trenton, N.S., became one of those people. He started at 15 as a machinist apprentice at the Trenton Steel Works in 1941, earning 13 cents an hour. By the time he retired five decades later, he had helped build refineries and power plants from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, served as a union representative across Western Canada, and won the first Red Seal certification for boilermakers in the country. His story is a useful lens through which to understand what the metal trades actually are — and why they matter.
Canada’s industrial infrastructure rests on a small cluster of skilled trades that most people never think about until something breaks. Boilermakers fabricate and maintain the pressure vessels at the heart of heavy industry — oil and gas, pulp and paper, power generation, shipyards. Ironworkers assemble structural steel, concrete and timber into the frameworks of industrial facilities. Pipefitters design and maintain mechanical piping systems. Metal fabricators shape plate and structural steel into finished components. Welders tie it all together, literally and permanently.
All of these trades trace their lineage to the blacksmith. When the industrial revolution got underway, it was blacksmiths who shaped, connected and installed the tools that reorganised the global economy. The metal trades are their direct descendants.
165 years in British Columbia
In 1861, a boilermaker named Joseph Spratt purchased two lots in Victoria and built the Albion Iron Works. The operation grew quickly. Within a few years, the shop consumed up to 80 tonnes of pig iron a month and ran a weekly payroll of $1,000 for 60 workers. That single shop marked the start of a continuous industrial presence in B.C. that has not ended since.
For more than 165 years, metal tradespeople have worked in heavy industry across the province. When they finish a job, they leave infrastructure behind: the processing facilities that produce what Canadians use, the jobs that sustain local communities, and the tax base that funds public services.
MacIntosh spent years contributing to that legacy in B.C. After working the Ontario refineries in Sarnia, he moved west and took dispatches to Powell River, Burnaby, Vancouver Island, Kamloops and eventually the remote mountain project at Kemano — where ALCAN was building what was billed at the time as the largest underground powerhouse in the world. Workers came from every province and most American states. MacIntosh served as job steward on his shift, helping manage the largest single crew of boilermakers ever assembled on one job in the history of Lodge 359.
What the work actually requires
MacIntosh’s navy training gave him an early glimpse of what the trade requires. At training camp, instructors introduced him to fire-tube and water-tube boilers, steam engineering, gauge glasses and instrumentation. Before any ship assignment, he cleaned boilers at the dockyard by hand — wire-brushing steam and mud drums, eating sandwiches with blackened fingers, exposed to asbestos lagging with every unit they opened. It was, he later wrote, “a dirty, dirty job.”
That physicality never really left. Metal tradespeople work at heights, in confined spaces, and sometimes both at once. At Kemano, MacIntosh’s crew worked penstock tunnels on a 48-degree incline, 2,600 feet above sea level, hauled up the mountainside by aerial tramway. In Kamloops, the crew started at 6 a.m. to escape the midday heat while hanging steel plate on scaffolding. The work picture changed with every dispatch. The physical demands did not.
The trades also require genuine technical literacy. Reading engineering drawings is not optional — it is how a tradesperson determines the design, dimensions, location and fit of every component before touching a tool. Knowing which tool prepares the metal, which executes the fit, which handles the lift and which seals the weld is the practical core of what a journeyperson knows. MacIntosh understood this early. When other trades challenged boilermaker jurisdiction at the IOCO refinery expansion near Vancouver in 1957, he cited the union’s jurisdiction manual from memory. Lodge 359 secretary-treasurer Maurice Hadley arrived on site with a worn copy and settled the matter. Boilermakers raised all refinery vessels in the province after that.
Welding credentials and the long game
Welding carries its own credential structure that runs across the entire career. Welders hold Canadian Welding Bureau (CWB) tickets for structural work, valid nationwide, as well as provincial pressure tickets for pressure-vessel work — and the provinces each administer their own. Every new job typically comes with a welding test. Pass, and the work starts. The tickets carry expiry dates and renewal costs. Managing that credential portfolio is part of the job.
The broader point is that the metal trades require sustained investment — in training, in upgrading, in certification. Workers who build Canada’s industrial infrastructure are not interchangeable. They are the product of formal apprenticeship, accumulated field experience and continuing education.
Building a workforce that stays
Recruiting people into the trades is straightforward. Retaining them over a career is harder. MacIntosh saw this clearly from his years as business manager of Lodge 359 in Vancouver. During the lean years of 1958 to 1963, membership fell below 200. Those who stayed paid full dues, knowing that if the lodge collapsed, they were finished. The lodge survived partly because it offered upgrading courses in blueprint reading, layout and rigging — as much to sustain morale as to build skill.
What keeps tradespeople in the industry over the long term is the same set of tools MacIntosh spent his career helping to build: pension plans, health benefits, training funds and fair hiring practices. When those exist, tradespeople make long-term commitments. They maintain their tickets, take on more complex work and eventually step into leadership. When they don’t, workers leave.
Canada needs Red Seal journeypersons in every corner of its economy. The metal trades have kept the lights on, the fuel flowing and the mills running for more than a century and a half. Robert MacIntosh spent his working life making sure that could continue. Whether the next generation of tradespeople is ready to do the same depends on whether the industry is serious about building the workforce to make it happen.
Richard MacIntosh is a Red Seal Boilermaker who worked in pulp and paper, hydro dams, oil and gas, cement, and other heavy industries. He is also a former instructor at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, he has extensive experience in trade education, union leadership, and international representation within the skilled trades. Reach him via [email protected].
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