Pensioners should not be last on the list to be paid when companies go bankrupt. Workers pay into their pension funds and that money belongs to the workers. The government must protect pensions now!

I am adding my name to the following petition to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

WHEREAS the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario legislative mandate is to provide regulatory services that protect the public interest and enhance public confidence in the sectors it regulates; and

WHEREAS the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario is responsible for the good administration of pension plans and to protect and safeguard the pension benefits and rights of pension plan beneficiaries.

We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:

To enshrine the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario with the abilities to: 

a. Block or place conditions on company takeovers, as well as bankruptcy and insolvency processes deemed to put pensions at risk. 

b. Ensure that any pension plan is funded at 100% prior to paying any secured creditors. 

c.  Ensure payment to workers, including any termination, severance pay and health benefits owing prior to any secured creditors. 

d. Ensure prevention of companies from stopping the payment of any retirement benefits during any proceedings under the bankruptcy and insolvency process.

e. To issue punitive fines on company directors and executives in cases of clear wrong doing and to claw back directors' and executives' bonuses after a company pension plan collapses.

Fact Sheets (preventionlink.ca)

Fact Sheets

No COVID Evictions! - Power of Many

In March, Doug Ford said no one would be evicted during a pandemic. But Ontario’s eviction moratorium was lifted in August and the Landlord and Tenant Board is undergoing an “Eviction Blitz” as they rush through as many hearings as possible. 

NDP MPP Suze Morrison recently tabled a motion in Ontario’s Legislature calling for an eviction ban until Ontario is in a post-pandemic recovery period. 

Email Premier Doug Ford, Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Steve Clark and your MPP urging them to support Motion #125 and immediately reinstate an eviction ban in Ontario.  

Resume the Legislature! - Power of Many

The Ontario legislature is in recess while the province continues to break single-day records for COVID-19 cases and deaths. This means that urgent work like legislating paid sick days, addressing understaffing in long-term care, establishing a plan for safer classrooms, and developing a comprehensive vaccine rollout program has been put on pause.

We cannot wait until February 16 for Ford to return to Queen’s Park. Call on Doug Ford and your MPP to reconvene the legislature immediately to:

• Legislate paid sick days
• Fix the long-term care crisis
• Establish a safer education plan
• Ramp-up vaccine rollout

For Immediate Release-Grey Bruce Labour Council

Paid Sick Days

It is hard to imagine a place taking a harder turn away from social progress as quickly and with such disastrous effects for citizens as Ontario undertook in the horrific regime of the Harris Tories of the mid- nineties and early twenty first century. Not since the days of Leslie Frost had so much progress been undermined and turned back. That is until the Doug Ford Tories were elected in the summer of 2018.

“The Ford Tories were elected on a populist agenda with its biggest selling point being “dollar a beer” and changing license plate colours. Not exactly an agenda that should have appealed to anyone looking out for the long term well being of Canada’s most populous province”, says Grey Bruce Labour Council Vice President for Bruce County, Dave Trumble. Unfortunately the “dog whistles” grabbed the electorate’s low hanging fruit.

This weak kneed Conservative election campaign declined to put forth any policy platform. Labour knew that, as much as possible, any Conservative government would align as quickly as possible with their minders such as the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and many local Chambers of Commerce to topple and roll back legislation that would bring forward improvements to working conditions, labour law and health and safety legislation for workers. Labour Council President, Kevin Smith notes, “the prediction was absolutely correct”.

The Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne, no stalwart friend of labour or working people, had for any number of reasons come to the conclusion that the time for labour law and employment standards reform was grossly overdue. The last progressive labour law reform had been upended by the Harris, laughably called, “Common Sense Revolution”. Labour Council Vice President for Grey County, Chris Stephen, knows as a previous candidate for the NDP “that Liberals are seldom aligned with workers for any other reason than to secure votes, but at least the reforms of late 2017 made a real difference”. A public employee, Stephen is painfully aware of the vast and unbridled privatization agenda of the Tories and how little the Liberals did to change this course. Nonetheless, there was hope in the labour law reform.

At the time the increase to a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage garnered the headlines. Employers and their various associations claimed that the end of life on earth was at hand if the increase in minimum wage to come to fruition. “Of course every modern economic model proved them wrong, but like a “dollar a beer” this was low hanging fruit for Ford and his cronies” says Smith. As important, if not more so, to workers and the reform agenda was the drive for some degree of sick leave provision. The provision, woefully inadequate as it was, was two paid sick days with ten days of leave in total. “Despite this meagre reform the Ford government wasted no time in eliminating this provision, amongst others” says Trumble.

With the remainder of 2018, all of 2019 and the first couple of months of 2020 the Ford Conservatives did not alter course. They “gutted” these progressive labour and employment standards changes from late 2017 while pursuing what Conservatives know as their only platform, doing all that is possible to undermine public services and any provisions that would elevate and improve working conditions for Ontario workers. “Little did anyone know that these choices would injure, make ill and likely kill people in the numbers we see in the pandemic”, says Trumble.

Labour leaders have called for a reckoning in a post COVID-19 world where those responsible for legislative choices that put our healthcare at risk will be somehow held to account. The Grey Bruce Labour Council will be privileged and anxious to make sure that the world knows of the reprehensible choices by the Ford Conservatives and any government that has sacrificed public services on the alter of tax cuts and privatization.

Smith points at the “The Ford Tories are so bound to their regressive dogma that they cannot even see the harm in real time that is being done as they rigidly and dispassionately deny a meagre 10 days of paid sick leave for Ontario workers”. The vast majority of workers without similar or better sick leave provisions are those that have carried the rest of us through the pandemic and they are the very ones that are choosing to feed their families or stay home when the don’t feel well. Of course these amazing workers are doing all they can to serve and protect all of us by doing what is best, “but the profound failure of the Ford Conservatives to push back against their handlers and employer associations is putting workers in untenable situations and without a doubt this has cost COVID-19 infections and lives. The caucus of obsequious MPP’s in Ford’s government must be held accountable for enabling the vastly unavoidable carnage of worker’s lives”, says the Grey Bruce Labour Council Executive.

The damage and shame of the Ford Conservatives will resonate long after COVID-19.

February 2021 | CNWC Newsletter – Canadian Nuclear Workers Council (cnwc-cctn.ca)

News about the latest studies confirming the “union safety effect” (mailchi.mp)

Emergency: COVID-19 Crisis Situation In Ontario Requires Stronger Measures AND Stronger Supports for People Impacted, Today is Deadliest Day of Pandemic So Far

Toronto – Today is the deadliest day of the pandemic so far, 89 people died in the last 24-hour period. By every measure the situation is critical, warns the Ontario Health Coalition, and there can be no question remaining that stronger measures are needed to control the devastation the virus is wreaking. At the same time, stronger supports for people who are the most impacted need to be an integral part of the strategy.

Hospitals:-

• Public hospitals, which continue to make superhuman efforts to fill gaps, provide vital leadership and support across the health system, and keep hospital services open at the same time, are now at or above full capacity across the board.
• In Toronto, physicians are publicly reporting no beds, no resuscitation rooms, ICUs full, nowhere to admit patients.
• The Burlington field hospital is open and patients from full hospitals in the region are being transferred there.
• Morgues in London and Windsor are now full.
• The Ontario Hospital Association is calling the situation “extremely serious” has put into effect its surge plans and is warning that ICU capacity (across the province) will be exceeded in coming weeks. It is planning for large scale transfers of patients.
• ICUs from Chatham through the GTA are full (both with COVID patients and other patients). Surgeries and other care are being cancelled as a result.

Long-Term Care:-

• 218 long-term care homes are in outbreak. Despite the continued denial, downplaying and dissembling by the Minister of Long-Term Care, the numbers are truly alarming. There are 160 new cases in the last 24 hours in long-term care, and 34 new deaths. There are 2,488 currently active cases in the last 24-hours (1,258 residents  1,230 staff), the most so far in the second wave. The deaths, which follow infections by several weeks, have escalated dramatically month over month since October.
• Tragically, we have to report the escalation of deaths in long-term care in the second wave as follows:

October 15 => 39

November 15 => 229 that is 190 in a month

December 15 => 576 that is 347 in a month

January 6 => 1,045 that is 469 in 3 weeks

Statement from the Ontario Health Coalition:

“The Ontario Health Coalition is in full support of stronger public health measures, including stronger safety and infection control measures in open businesses, full public reporting of outbreaks, more effective and coherent shutdowns.

We do not say this lightly. We understand that shutdowns have impacts on health and well-being and that shutdown measures must include much stronger support measures for individuals, families, communities and local businesses.

Just as the terrible toll of the virus impacts some people more than others—racialized communities, working class and low-income people, the elderly, people in supportive congregate care among others – so too the shutdowns impact some groups more than others.

Understanding this, Ontarians need to take extraordinary and stronger measures to save the lives and health of people in our province and at the same time, individuals whose employment has been or will be impacted need full support for income and housing, and local businesses need full supports to survive the pandemic.

Families at risk and people, including young people, with mental health needs, need extra resources and support.

Our government can do a much better job of providing coordination and supports for these protections.

Across the board we need a much more competent response from our provincial government, including:

• Stronger, more coherent public health measures, including a fast ramp up of testing, contact tracing and quarantine capacity in public health and labs must be undertaken now so that the province can get the spread of the virus under control.
• There must be fewer contacts among people to reduce community and workplace transmission and stronger public health measures across the board, including shutdowns and stronger safety measures in open businesses, must be undertaken.
• Ontarians need to stay home as much as possible.
• The crisis in staffing capacity in long-term care must be addressed without any further delay. We need a large-scale paid recruitment, training and deployment of staff, with improved wages and working conditions for those staff. This needs to start right away. LTC homes must have systematic interventions at a very early point in outbreaks to stabilize staffing and ensure infection control practices are followed; and resources for cohorting must be provided, including field hospitals or similar. Hospital teams must be sent into all of the homes where staffing has fallen to unsafe levels and the military is needed as an emergency measure where hospital overloads are delaying decisions to send in teams. Long-term care homes that are demonstrating negligence and incompetence must face strong accountability measures, orders, fines and license revocations.
• Wherever possible, public field hospitals or the like need to be staffed and opened to help with the overload of residents in long-term care and retirement homes with COVID-19 and the hospital overload. All-hands-on-deck are needed now. The province must help with a major recruitment drive to get staff to ramp up this capacity.
• The vaccine roll-out needs to be coherent, competent and much faster. All long-term care and retirement home staff, residents and essential care givers must be vaccinated as a priority without delay. The thousands of health professionals from primary and community care that have volunteered to staff 24/7 vaccination clinics and teams must be integrated into the roll-out to maximize capacity and public health nurses must be included as leaders in the planning because they have the with the experience and expertise for mass-scale vaccine roll out.
• Community care, which is taking more of the burden of COVID-19 cases as hospitals are full, must be provided with clear directives to ensure staff have proper PPE including N95 masks.”