TORONTO - Management Board of Cabinet “leaks” to reporters about the status of Ontario Public Service bargaining are a repeat of what happened in the 1996 OPS strike, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union says.
“In the last two days, we have seen this employer use behind-the-scenes leaks to try to demoralize OPSEU strikers,” said OPSEU president Leah Casselman. “This is exactly what Management Board Chair Dave Johnson did in 1996, and where is he now? That strategy backfired in 1996, and it will backfire in 2002.”
On March 27, 1996, Johnson told reporters that OPSEU had put new demands on the table and that contract talks in the OPS could drag on for weeks.
“This was a lie,” said Casselman. “We had not tabled new demands at that time."
“What is most interesting is that the strike was over and OPSEU members were back on the job just five days after Johnson made those remarks. We take the government’s latest desperate remarks as a sign that they may be ready to get serious about bargaining.”
Casselman said yesterday that all outstanding issues in bargaining could be settled in 48 hours if the employer negotiating team had a new mandate to bargain.
Today, an unnamed source told some media outlets that OPSEU had not responded to a proposal tabled by the government in bargaining Saturday.
“First of all, that’s not true, and second of all, the government’s concept of a media blackout is decidedly grayish,” Casselman said. “Dave Tsubouchi and bureaucrats like Kevin Wilson and Malcolm Smeaton should shut up and let the bargaining teams do their work.”
Wilson is Assistant Deputy Minister, Human Resources Division, Management Board of Cabinet; Smeaton is Executive Lead, Contingency Planning and reports to Wilson.
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For more information: Randy Robinson (416) 448-7441; (416) 788-9134
