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On January 18, 2019, Ontario Northland formalized and issued a new Drug and Alcohol Policy to ONTC employees. A draft policy was sent to Unifor on November 7, 2018, but we had no formal discussions on this draft as we had not yet received all the documents that formed this new policy (Appendices A and B). Consequently, we were surprised to see the policy issued before we had the opportunity, as the certified bargaining agent, to review the full context of the policy and meet to discuss our concerns and propose amendments.
On January 28, 2019, Unifor National Representative Barry Kennedy wrote Ontario Northland to highlight Unifor’s concerns with the following parts of this policy:
- Prevention, Assistance & Treatment
- Searches and Inspections
- Testing after Accidents and Incidents
- Post Treatment and Post-Violation
- Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) levels of 0.02
- Safety Sensitive Position of Unifor Local 103
We sent another letter on February 3rd that reiterated our concerns and the manner by which ONTC requires members to sign and acknowledge the policy. We also informed the ONTC that when signing “Appendix A” we are instructing our membership to write the following statement with their acknowledgement:
My signature regarding compliance is without prejudice to and pending any intervention that may be made by my bargaining agent.
We are planning to have discussions with ONTC on the new Drug and Alcohol Policy during next week’s bargaining sessions.
