Unionized healthcare workers and other front-line workers staged a protest in front of Sault Ste. Marie MPP Ross Romano’s office Wednesday morning decrying the impacts of Bill 195.
The protest - organized by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), Unifor and the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU) - is part of a larger, province-wide effort to force the Ford government to repeal the bill, and revoke the COVID-19 emergency orders that detractors say override their basic workplace rights and collective agreements.
OCHU President Michael Hurley told local supporters that a “terrible contradiction” exists between the “nice words” from Ontario Premier Doug Ford calling workers heroes, and on the other hand, “stripping them of basic workplace rights.”
“We’re going to mobilizing our members, and we’re going to do whatever it takes to push the Ontario government to do the right thing here, which is to restore the basic rights that we have in our workplace as a small gesture to our members for the tremendous sacrifice that they’ve made,” he said.
Bryan Keith, northern Ontario representative for CUPE Ontario, told SooToday that vacation time, leave - in addition to shift schedules and the location of those shifts - can pretty much be changed on a whim, leaving essential healthcare workers and their families without support.
“A lot of workers are single parents or have children, and unfortunately, daycares are not open yet, many of them are not open,” said Keith. “So how are these workers going to be able to go to work with children at home?”
There’s also a lingering fear that Bill 195 will be used to thwart collective agreements between unions and employers, and could lead to job elimination and layoffs without protection for front-line workers across Ontario.
“It opens the door for the government to dictate vacation, seniority, benefits like sick time, those sorts of things,” said Tara Maszczakiewicz, who represents over 2,000 workers locally as regional vice-president for OPSEU region 6. “So it really negates a contract that’s been hard-won and fought for, and should be respected.”
Hurley says that Bill 195 flies in the face of the nearly 7,000 front-line workers in Ontario who tested positive for COVID-19, and the workers who died because of the virus.
“We wanted to step up for the people of Ontario during the crisis, and we tried to do that - and our members paid a terrible price for that, because the government didn’t really protect them,” said Hurley. “They didn’t provide them with the kind of health and safety guidance that was needed against this virus. They didn’t provide them with the kind of equipment they needed - and so, 16 of them are dead in Ontario.”
Similar protests have already been staged in Pembroke, Brockville, Cornwall, Kenora, Fort Frances and Thunder Bay, with more planned for other regions of the province throughout September and October.
