The St. Lawrence Seaway is a vital link to the rest of the world for much of the Canadian economy.
More than 37 million tonnes of cargo last year passed through the waterway’s locks along the Welland Canal and the St. Lawrence River. Add to that more than 10,000 pleasure craft moving through the Seaway, and you begin to see how important the system is to the Canadian fabric.
Any leader will tell you they can’t be effective without knowing what people are concerned about at any given time – the issues that come up with family and friends, their anxieties, their desires of today and their hopes for the future. As a national union leader, I spend a lot of time talking to people – finding out about them and their lives.
JIM STANFORD - Economist with Unifor, Canada's largest private-sector trade union, published in the Globe and Mail, Letters to the Editor on August 11, 2014
Written byUnifor Western Director Joie Warnock in response to a news release issued on July 28th
In a news release issued on July 28, trade minister Ed Fast and BC Finance Minister Mike DeJong struggled to put a positive spin on an increasingly ugly situation at Cascade Aerospace.
Unifor Western Director Joie Warnock wrote a column for the July 15 edition of the Province newspaper explaining what is behind the strike by Unifor Local 114 workers at Cascade Aerospace in Abbotsford, BC.
If you don’t go to Abbotsford often, you may not have noticed 24-hour-a-day picket lines at Cascade Aerospace.
Russ Day, Unifor Local 601 unit chair at the Chevron Burnaby Refinery, recently had the Letter of the Day in the Vancouver Province newspaper. The following letter appeared June 29:
A recent editorial from a handful of construction unions (“Northern Gateway pipeline needed to enrich us all”) was long on rhetoric about the Northern Gateway pipeline and short on facts.
According to the Alberta Federation of Labour, only 228 permanent jobs will be created from a pipeline opposed by 130 First Nations, most BC municipalities, and half of British Columbians.
With new collective agreements covering 2,000 workers at Resolute Forestry Products' 11 locations across Ontario and Quebec - a deal that will set the pattern for negotiations with 8,000 other workers east of the Manitoba border - this vital industry is on a renewed footing and ready for a long-overdue national dialogue on the future of forestry.
If Tim Hudak is elected, Ontario will see unprecedented job cuts, healthcare cuts, education cuts and the decimation of workers’ rights.
For those who value decent jobs, good health care, strong communities and a bright, stable future for our children, the primary objective in this election must be to keep Tim Hudak from becoming premier.
That means supporting the candidate with the best chance of defeating the local Conservative candidate.
This past week, it has been my incredible honour to stand beside workers – members of Unifor, and those working to join – as they stood up for their rights and for a voice in their communities.
Last Thursday, I stood with team members at Toyota in Ontario as we announced an escalation of their effort to join Unifor and become the first assembly plant outside the Detroit Big Three to be unionized in Canada.
Rogers Broadcasting Limited is right now asking the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (our national broadcast regulator) to rewrite the rules governing ethnic television in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta – and not to the benefit of ethnic communities.
