(rdnewsNOW/Josh Hall)

By Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

ARROGANT AND ILLEGAL, SAYS HEALTH CRITIC

Union members gather in Red Deer to protest UCP’s Bill 9

Jul 29, 2019 | 4:20 PM

Members of several unions voiced their displeasure outside Red Deer Regional Hospital with the UCP government’s decision to delay contract negotiations until after its budget comes out this fall.

The event was not a strike, and took place during employees’ lunch hour.

Karen Weiers, Vice President with the Alberta Union of Public Employees (AUPE), says public service workers are angry, and that they should be.

“The members organized this rally on their own to show that they are angry. They had a contract, a deal, it was negotiated in good faith and the current government has come in, and legislated law, Bill 9, that takes away their constitutional right to a collective agreement,” Weiers says.

“If they can come in and make a law to break a contract, they can come in on any contract, and that’s a huge concern. Whether you like unions or you don’t like unions, this is a fact that the government has used their power to come in and break a collective agreement, which is a contract.”

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Weiers says Bill 9 affects 70,000 AUPE members ranging from nurses to health care aides, and general support service workers to post-secondary workers. Numbers total 180,000, she says, between the different unions.

Others represented Monday include the United Nurses of Alberta, Alberta Federation of Labour, Canadian Union of Public Employees, and the Health Sciences Association of Alberta.

“It’s incredibly arrogant and frankly illegal. We know that there’s already a court challenge that’s been brought forward by the United Nurses of Alberta, and there’s going to be others that are going to get in on that,” says Edmonton MLA David Shepherd, who is also the Alberta NDP’s Health Critic.

“The arrogance of this government in coming forward and making that their first action basically demonstrates the amount of trust and support they have for public workers in this province, which is none.”

Shepherd says if the UCP’s Blue Ribbon Panel, which has a goal of balancing the budget by 2022-23, is just going to set out to break contracts, the quality of health care will suffer.

“We need to work with the people who go to work every day to help provide it (health care),” he says. “When we break their trust, we are breaking that relationship and our opportunity to work with them to improve the system.”