Response to Ontario Budget 2010
OPSEU Demo at Dwight Duncan Fundraiser in Toronto, April 19
April 20, 2010
The Bay Street bankers attending a $400-a-plate fundraiser
for Finance Minister Dwight Duncan in downtown Toronto yesterday were
greeted with this message from an enthusiastic group of OPSEU members:
Working people are not the problem. Stop the corporate giveaways!
The irony is that Toronto’s corporate elite are raising
funds for Duncan’s re-election in Windsor next year. Windsor has an
unemployment rate of 12.2 per cent, the highest in Ontario. It’s fair to
assume not many people there can afford to lay down $400 for dinner.
The spirited OPSEU contingent, lead by Region 5 Executive
Board Members Nancy Pridham, Derek Miller and Ted Montgomery, handed out
flyers to the hundreds of transit commuters streaming into the subway at the
end of the work day, and to the expensively-suited Bay Street types heading
into the venue called the Grand Banking Hall.
“Last night was a great turnout of members,” said Region 5
vice-president Nancy Pridham. “The people who went into the dinner got the
message loud and clear from us. We said: here’s your menu, you’re going to
be seeing a lot of us!”
Members had fun with the union’s message, telling the
business people hurrying into the fundraiser: “You’ll be having frozen
dinners in honour of the public sector salary freeze at Dwight’s dinner.”
Pridham said the union’s message is resonating with members.
“Members are upset that they’re expected to take the hit for something they
didn’t cause. They see managers continuing to get performance bonuses for
laying off workers and keeping people down.”
At a special Executive Board meeting held recently, a number
of strategies were developed to address the recent provincial budget and the
public sector wage controls it contains.
OPSEU is calling on the Liberal government to cancel
upcoming corporate tax cuts, cancel the pay-for-performance bonuses of top
public sector managers, create a new high income tax bracket so the
privileged few at the top can do their share for Ontario, and create a
low-income cut-off that exempts the lowest-paid workers from the wage
freeze.
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