Construction supervisor Roger Bula worked hard to be a better father than his own | Canada Voices

Roger Bula: Construction supervisor. Adventure-lover. Lawyer. Father. Born Feb. 3, 1959, in Regina; died April 24, 2026, in New Westminster, B.C., of heart failure; aged 67.

You likely wouldn’t know Roger Bula’s name even if you lived in Vancouver all your life. But he’s one of the people who built this city over the last 40 years.

For decades he worked as a surveyor and concrete-formwork supervisor and went everywhere. He worked on the first SkyTrain line in the 1980s; the snowshed on the Coquihalla Highway; condos in Vancouver and Burnaby; office buildings in Surrey, and many more. In the last few months, it was a new bus barn where the whole team relied on his math and computer skills to place hundreds of anchor bolts in the concrete.

But he went home from work April 23, slowed down once again by intense back and leg pain. It had troubled him since an operation three years earlier when bone spurs were discovered on discs at the top of his spine. The pain never stopped him from working, though. He chugged pain-relief muscle relaxants, got a cane and kept going to work.

Roger did not have the easiest life. He struggled with mental health and was a heavy drinker and smoker like his father, who died in a hotel in the Downtown Eastside in 1980. But Roger was also an adventurer and a funny, helpful brother to his older sister, Frances.

Growing up in North Vancouver, Roger was the youngest of three rambunctious brothers, and four siblings. He wanted to be a vet in his early days, perhaps inspired by his much-loved mutt Augie.

Instead, he went on to train as a surveyor at the B.C. Institute of Technology, interspersing study with legendary windsurfing, scuba-diving and motorcycle trips in the U.S. and Canada. Amid all that, he got married to Barb McCutcheon in 1985 and had two daughters, Katherine and Kendal.

Roger made sure to be a loving father, avoiding the violence and downhill slide his father had gone through. He built backyard forts for his children and his nephew Marek and enjoyed cooking for his family (his egg-themed brunch dishes were a regular for years). He loved setting off thousands of dollars’ worth of fireworks at Halloween to entertain the kids. Rog’s motto about the Bula family’s conversational style? “If you can’t be more interesting, just get louder.”

He was known for his irreverent humour and insistence on people doing things the right way. It wasn’t just work that had to be right. He once fired a construction worker for pestering a bird with babies in a nest on one of the upper floors of a job site.

In the late 1980s, he decided to become a lawyer, and he completed his degree in 1993 at UBC with stellar grades. He opened an independent practice but, following a period where he was very down and subsequently got divorced, he returned to construction.

When Kendal was in a near-fatal car crash in 2010, Roger moved in with his daughter for two years to take care of her as she recovered from brain injury. (Her mother had died five years earlier.) Roger then rented an apartment in the same building for another two years so he could make Kendal dinner most nights and continue to support her.

At monthly family gatherings, he entertained everyone with tales about the ups and downs of his latest work project (where he refused to play board games but advised everyone on the best strategies from the sidelines). And he made sure to buy his sister Frances a Christmas tree every year, then mock everyone for the bad job they did putting it up.

After Rog experienced nerve damage and surgery complications that affected his fine-motor abilities, he began teaching Kendal’s partner, Jai, some of his kitchen skills, such as how to carve a turkey and the art of gravy-making. Jai thought it was magical, but Roger, of course, explained the chemical process involved in the flour-fat blend to start the roux. Because it was important to Roger that we all understood the science.

Frances Bula is Roger Bula’s sister.

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