Welcome all delegates to Convention 2001:

Convention is the time when we look at the bigger picture:

When we look at how OPSEU works for all of its members,

And how we fit into the broader labour movement.

Part of the bigger picture includes what happens in the world that affects working people.

Like the free trade agreement of the Americas being negotiated right now in secret, or the General Agreement on Trade in Services, which could force our governments to privatize services even further than they're doing now.

These events might seem far removed from the day to day problems of your workplace. But over time, we know that these trade agreements will have a profound impact on our members and on our union.

Because like it or not, Mike Harris is not an isolated phenomenon. There are governments like his all across North America and the world.The things his government does are in part dictated by world-wide trends.

So when unionists, environmentalists and human rights activists get together at the People's Summit in Quebec City later this month,

Their message to the world will be that free trade agreements should be out in the open because they are about people, not just higher profits for big corporations.

To know where we’re headed, we can look back at some of the victories that got us to this point. Over the past year, OPSEU has won some fairly significant victories:

We've had success at our bargaining tables, we've won some significant grievance awards and we've won some major workplace votes. And many of our members have had to make some pretty tough decisions, especially those of us directly touched by divestments, by closures or privatizations.

The members in my workplace, like so many others since this downloading and privatization began, chose overwhelmingly to stay with OPSEU. We know that belonging to a union has distinct advantages for our families and us.

We chose the advantage of belonging to union that offers a strong partnership between the central union and locals, between our activist members and our union staff.

I’d like you to join me, as we begin this 2001 Convention, in saying thank you to all those members who chose to stay with OPSEU in the past year, and also join me in welcoming all the new members who have come on board.

• To the hundreds of members at the Metro Toronto Housing Corporation
• To our members at the psychiatric hospitals in Brockville, in Kingston,in London and St. Thomas.
• To our members at my own facility Syl Apps and other young offender facilities.
• To our members working for the Ottawa-Carleton ambulance services and in Halton Region ambulance.
• To our members working at the newly-amalgamated Ottawa hospital, in the new Niagara Health System, and at the newly-merged St. Joseph Health in Hamilton.

Over the past year, more than 4,600 members re-signed with OPSEU, and about 1,300 new members joined us in the BPS.

We stand united in celebrating our victories and

We stand for the positive things that make OPSEU the best choice for workers in Ontario. Bargaining and defending and organizing and re-organizing members comes with a fairly high price in terms of dues revenue and staff time.

For example, OPSEU commits more than four per cent of our total resources to organizing.

That's more than $2 million each year, and out of that, about 80 per cent goes to reorganize members in divestments and privatizations and Bill 136 merger votes.

And that doesn't include what we put into campaigning to try to stop the divestments, or what it costs to bargain new first contracts for them.

We know that money's well spent. Our members need us as they continue to be threatened in almost every OPS ministry and in the colleges and the smaller employers.

We've put up a good fight this past year in protecting the sisters and brothers in the corrections ministry, and for the people who work the air ambulances and in the offices of the finance ministry

Right now we're also fighting on all fronts to save driver examiners' jobs in the Ministry of Transportation, and for our members at the Ministry of Education & Training's Independent Learning Centre.

I want to congratulate all members and our staff involved in these and other campaigns, provincially and locally.

Thanks for all your efforts, because these days it's not easy to buck the trend to privatization. It's not easy to get the message out that keeping services public is the best for our society.

I find that people outside OPSEU, and even in our own membership, have little idea of the scope of the challenges we face. Many of our members don't appreciate the person-power and resources required to take on these fights -whatever it takes to run a union and get the job done.

One of the areas where we have to put more resources is in serving our francophone members. Sisters and brothers, we must become better at providing services in both languages. This is not a choice but an obligation, if we want our union to remain a strong united force.

This year there were many good examples of what it means to have the resources to do the union job right:

The contamination of Walkerton’s water supply last summer killed seven people and made more than 2,000 sick. It's by far the biggest crisis the Harris government faced since coming to office.

Our members saw it coming: A report prepared by and for our members in 1997 predicted the disastrous consequences of a 40 per cent staff cut to the Ministry of Environment.

We said you couldn't cut 900 ministry jobs without drastic consequences down the road. That report was widely circulated at the time, and today it forms the basis for the critique of the Harris government’s environmental record.

For the first time since Harris took office, his mishandling of the environment has become one of the top issues people care about in this province.

After the Walkerton tragedy broke, OPSEU fought to force the government first to hold a public inquiry, and then we fought for protection for whistle-blowers who might testify at the inquiry.

I'm proud to report that both of our goals were achieved.

And we’re now working with our members to put together our position on the mandate of the Ministry of Environment and the strategic importance of the Ontario Clean Water Agency, our folks who cleaned up Walkerton.

Our activity around Walkerton shows OPSEU is committed to supporting our members who make sure Ontarians have clean and safe water for the future.

Keep it safe, and to do that we must keep it public.

It's tempting to blame tragedies like Walkerton on individual workers who may make mistakes. Mike Harris loves to do that. Blame the workers, blame the staff.

But any solid system of public services should be able to withstand individual mistakes. There should be enough safeguards and enough checks and balances so that there is a fail-safe mechanism when people make mistakes.

That's why it's even more important today for OPSEU to advocate and mobilize for a well-funded public services system. We need a system where people aren't poisoned by their water supply, and where unwanted babies don't starve because the case-workers are so overloaded no one's monitoring neglectful mothers.

The cuts Mike Harris made to child welfare agencies back in 1995 are still being felt across the province. The workload for our members has doubled and families are still falling through the cracks, despite recent attempts to throw money at the problem.

That's what makes the role of OPSEU different from most other unions.

That's why we put more resources into speaking out and why we have to be active on the political scene.

This "reasonable efforts" contract language is something that we won as a result of the sacrifice our members made during the OPS strike. Back in 1996, it was just a tiny crack in the door toward winning back our successor rights.

But over the years, we have kicked that door wide open with a whole whack of grievance arbitrations and settlements, each one building on the last.

That contract language we won in the strike is still working for members today, in stalling or even stopping privatizations, and in making sure they get jobs with the new employers.

Just 10 days ago, we won another landmark award that guarantees seniority rights for layoffs and promotions with the new employers.

OPSEU resources also go to support our members who take action on health and safety:

Like the members of Local 310 at the Newmarket Court House who stood together in support of their union against the severe health risk posed by mould, forcing the ministry to shut down the courthouse and remove the hazard.. .

Our central pool of resources continues to support our health and safety and our grievance work, and the work of bargaining teams from province-wide negotiations to the smallest BPS contract.

It doesn’t matter how small your bargaining unit is, your OPSEU team will get the training and the staff support and the strike fund to carry out their mandate.

Our college support team carried out an excellent round of negotiations,

and wound up with a major double-digit wage increase for nearly 6,000 members.

And let's also congratulate the new part-timers at the Royal Ontario Museum, Local 543, who won a breakthrough first contract that actually doubled the wages for many members.

Let us recognize the members who made the big sacrifice and went out on strike for new contracts since our last Convention:

• The members of Local 269 at the Hamilton-Wentworth VON, who were out for 33 days last summer and fall.

• And the members of Local 274, the Hamilton-Wentworth Community Care Access Centre, who struck for nine cold weeks before settling in December.

Both of these strikes achieved breakthroughs in the growing community health care sector. It's a tough sector to organize in but that's where the members desperately need a union.

We need to be smarter in using the grievance procedure to enforce the contracts. And our members need training and support from our union.

And they need advice and expertise from people in other bargaining units in the same sector.

And as I've said, we have to engage the public to get them on our side and advocate for a better, well-funded system.

That’s a tall order.

That's why we set out some concrete objectives to build a Network for Better Contracts.

The policy we adopted at Convention last year committed our union to the goals of organizing, collective bargaining, and public policy and mapped out the ways to improve them.

Why do we need to build a strong network? Because we recognize our members need and expect and deserve more form their union than they ever did before.

Because times are tougher than ever, and members need more advice and support than ever.

We at OPSEU must continue to be committed to upholding the ideals of the labour movement.

We must also be committed to moving forward to build a strong network that can withstand the attacks from our employers and help us come out victorious in any workplace vote.

Because brothers and sisters, it’s not what we did for our members last year, last week or even yesterday that counts:

It’s what we are doing for them today, and what we will be doing for them tomorrow. That’s' what counts. We have to keep improving and adding to our network with new ideas and new energy and new people as we move forward together.

Over the past year, we have taken big steps in the areas of training and development:: We’ve instituted a program for training our bargaining teams,

We created a refresher course for our staff negotiators, and we launched a program to train and mentor Membership Development Trainees.

If we have the resources to see it through, this program will go a long way to ensure that we have a pool of energetic and trained members to draw upon when we need them.

I am also particularly proud of our Local Leadership Development program.This new program is about engaging local leaders in strategic discussions in our locals, across sectors, in our divisions and in our ministries.. .

Building our network also means we have to create the conditions for recruiting solid union activists, and for you to be able to spend more time on your union work.

That’s why I support the creation of a new local time off fund that will offer you more paid time to work on local union business, on a cost-shared basis.

We’re also proposing a new Solidarity Fund, a fund that would be accessible to members who face extra hurdles like professional discipline or lawsuits from clients, or who have to testify at inquests, or appeal their LTD claims.

Over the past year we have also moved to realign our staffing structure to help build the Network for Better Contracts in our operations. This means changes to assignments and internal reporting structures.This is not an easy task or one that can be done overnight.

We are responding to a need for negotiations expertise on a sectoral basis for the BPS, so that we have staff who become more expert on specific types of contracts and sectoral issues, be they in social services, justice, health care or education or the private sector.

On behalf of OPSEU members and all of us here, I want to thank all of our OPSEU staff for their fine work over the past year

And I ask all of you for your continued patience as we continue building our Network into the union's operations.

Last year, Harris made some changes to the labour laws that make people work longer for less pay and he made it harder for them to organize.

And just last month, Labour Minister Chris Stockwell announced his mega-merger of most of the tribunals devoted to workers' rights.

He wants to merge the Ontario Labour Relations Board

and the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal

and the Board of Inquiry under the Ontario Human Rights Code

and the Education Relations Commission

and the College Relations Commission

and the Workplace Safety and Insurance Appeals Tribunal.

Just imagine, six boards to one.

All have some effect on our ability to get justice for our members.

His plan would slash the total number of arbitrators by two-thirds, and downsize the jobs of OPSEU members on staff who support their work. And we know he's also got secret plans for the Grievance Settlement Board and the Office of the Worker Advisor.

These boards have allowed us to push forward on workers rights,

And Stockwell has his marching orders from Harris: He's ordered to slow down justice for working people and make it harder and more expensive for us to get fairness for our members.

This is the latest step in the new Ontario labour relations climate

The fact is, it's really a throwback to the 1930s.

At this Convention, we also have to turn our minds to make sure that our union's governing Executive Board is representative of our members. I hope you have had time to read the report of the Task Force on Board Restructuring that was mandated by last year’s Convention.

The Task Force recommends we consult the membership about whether they think our Board adequately reflects and represents the membership of our union.

I believe our governing union structures must reflect all of our members, whatever sector or region they work in.

It promises to be a busy one for collective bargaining, with the opportunity to make some breakthroughs.

Our CAAT-Academic team is now preparing to enter negotiations with the college. With rumours of college restructuring and privatization, this is sure to be a tough round.

There's a recent report of the higher education ministry. It's called the Investing in Students Task Force -- the usual Harris double-talk --but it's really about the government investing in private sector education.

It also talks about eliminating the Council of Regents, the management group that bargains on behalf of the 25 colleges. Eliminating the Council could mean we are forced to negotiate 50 college contracts instead of two.Overall, the report shows that Harris may be up to the same kind of mischief and chaos in the college system as he's already done to our schools.

Scores of our BPS contracts also expired at the end of March and many of you are in tough negotiations right now. Good luck to those teams.

We also expect to be going to the table for members in the Ontario Public Service this fall. Demands are being set and the teams will be elected later this month.

OPS negotiations are particularly important, not only for our 50,000 OPS members, but also because they could set the pattern for much of the rest of the public sector.

A couple of weeks ago, the rookie provincial Treasurer, Jim Flaherty, fired the first volley when he suggested a wage cap for Ontario public sector workers. This presents a major challenge to our teams to become more creative at the bargaining table, and it challenges the rest of us to help mobilize our members to support those teams so we can knock Flaherty's cap right off!

Sisters and brothers, I'm confident that the decisions we will make in the next three days will allow OPSEU to continue to rise to these challenges on behalf of all our members.