PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
A Clash of Priorities Every day, workers continue to join Unions because employers continue to exploit them. And employers continue to exploit workers because the government not only allows that exploitation, but helps it along through policy and legislation that tells working people that they’re asking for more than they deserve. You are someone who works for a living. In fact, you’re likely an essential worker who, over the last year and a half, has worked and lived through a pandemic. What do you believe you deserve? And what are your priorities as a worker for this province? It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of Doug Ford nor the Progressive Conservatives (PCs). I believe that the PC party’s priorities do not align with the priorities of
working people; a position that Doug Ford has made abundantly clear. But with just under a year to the next provincial election, we also must think about what we want to see from our elected officials? • Ford froze the pay for broader public sector workers, limiting them to 1% increases per year for three years. • He cut a planned 3% increase to social assistance programs and ended the basic income pilot program. • He eliminated the two paid sick days introduced by the previous government. • He froze minimum wage so that workers, who could’ve been making $15 per hour as of January 2019, are now only making $14.25 per hour.
Not only do these decisions not support working people in any way, but they actually take things away from workers. More recently, he held an emergency session of the legislature to invoke the notwithstanding clause, which allows the government to temporarily override a portion of your Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and pass Bill 307. That Bill reintroduced parts of the PC’s Bill 254 that amended the Election Finances Act; the same parts of Bill 254 that a Superior Court Judge ruled as unconstitutional the week before. Bill 307 limits third-party spending to $600,000 for the 12-month period before an election. Before, the $600,000 spending limit only applied to the six months leading up to an election. continued on page 5…
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