Jim Tait (1941-2008)

One of the so-called “Four Horsemen” founders of OPSEU and Staff Representative

Jim Tait, longtime OPSEU activist and staff representative, has died. He was 67.

“OPSEU owes a great deal to Brother Jim Tait and those of his era,” said OPSEU President Smokey Thomas. “Out of all the turmoil in building OPSEU in the 1970s came a much stronger union, much more responsive to the needs and aspirations of its members, and one that is always in the forefront to social change in Ontario.”

Jim Tait was born March 13, 1941, in Leith, Scotland, a working class suburb of Edinburgh. Born to seafaring family, he always wanted to be a sailor or to join the Royal Navy; he spent his early teens on trawler in the North Sea and the North Atlantic near Iceland.

But his family emigrated to Canada in 1957, where his father became a gold miner in South Porcupine in northeastern Ontario.

Jim worked in the mines and mills around Timmins before coming to Toronto in the mid-1960s, first working in brokerage firms at the Toronto Stock Exchange before landing a job as a clerk at the OHIP building on Overlea Boulevard. When OHIP was brought into the Ontario Public Service in 1971, Jim became a member of the Civil Service Association of Ontario (CSAO), the forerunner of OPSEU.

In 1972, Jim was elected president of the Toronto OHIP Branch of CSAO, which later became OPSEU Local 548. In October, 1972, he attended the Annual General Meeting of the CSAO and was elected director for OHIP, one of six Health Ministry directors on the CSAO Board.

The next day, the CSAO Board met to select the president, who was hand-picked by the CSAO general manager. As Jim recalled: “From that day on I realized that the Freemasons were running the CSAO, and that there was no real membership input into the leadership.” For more than 50 years, the Civil Service Association had been dominated by powerful general managers like Harold Bowen, Ron Morse and, lastly and most notoriously, the legendary Jake Norman. Most were known Tory supporters.

Jim became one of the famed “four horsemen” who were instrumental in turning CSAO into the member-run union that it is today, controlled by elected members and Convention. The other four horsemen were Ron Haggett, from Brockville Psych, Vic Williams from the MNR, and Neil Pollock from the colleges. Like Jim, all of the horsemen later became OPSEU staff reps.

Jim was a committed shop-floor activist. In 1975, he organized a sit-down strike at the Overlea building over a health and safety issue of faulty air conditioning.

Jim moved the motion at the CSAO AGM that the two top officers were to be elected by the delegates rather than by the Board members -- a major step in union democracy. He became vice-president for Region 5 on the new OPSEU Executive Board and chaired the committee that framed the first OPSEU constitution.

Jim was re-elected to the board in 1977. In 1978, he applied for job as a Staff Representative in Toronto. It was baptism by fire: He was assigned the four Toronto jails, the Queen Street Mental Health and the large MTO local in Downsview. His first day on the job, he was dispatched to the Don Jail to file 50 grievances including discipline and dismissal.

In 1984, Jim transferred to the Guelph Office, and then to the Niagara Office a few years later, where he worked as a staff rep until 1997, when transferred to head office in Toronto on a medical accommodation. He officially retired in 2006, but returned to work part-time for OPSEU as a researcher until his death.

Ever the union activist, Jim was president of OPSSU staff union from 1979-81 and remained active in the staff union ever since.

Jim was a fervent believer in social change, in the right to strike and the right to control our pension money. OPSEU owes Jim a great deal when you consider the political risks he took and the sacrifices he made for the union both as an activist and as staff. He will be missed by many in this union.