Desperate to distract from the attention being paid to allegations of dodgy contracts pushed by government insiders, Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) attacked the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), accusing its Ontario-based national office of “attacking” public sector bargaining.
In a joint statement laden with falsehoods published on the official Alberta government website, Finance Minister Nate Horner and Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides played the venerable “Eastern Bastards” card to try to gin up anger at the union for the strike by education workers in several communities for a living wage.
Under the confusingly vague headline “CUPE National attacks: Joint statement,” the press release begins, “CUPE National union with Ontario-based leadership is interfering in what should be local negotiations between school boards and CUPE locals, and in other areas using tactics of fear and intimidation to prevent deals from being signed.”
Gee whiz! A couple of words missing there, for sure! Someone must’ve written that one up in a hurry. Or maybe the ministers wrote it themselves. I’ve taken a screenshot in case anyone gets around to editing that lead.
The ministerial twosome accused CUPE’s national leadership of “effectively deregistering” a CUPE local in Medicine Hat to keep it from organizing a ratification vote.
Never mind that the local in question had already been placed under administration for reasons unrelated to bargaining and therefore any deal the local union’s executive signed would have been of no legal force or effect. Surely that is a fact the government knew.
And never mind that the UCP constantly pretends it’s not party to the negotiations – even though it has passed legislation that allows it to give secret mandates to public sector boards and agencies, and it’s illegal for them to even tell the unions they’re negotiating with that’s happened. (I know, dear readers, that if you live in another Canadian province, you must think I’m making this up. Nevertheless, it is all true.)
In rebuttal, CUPE Alberta President Rory Gill shot back that “rather than step up to the plate and negotiate a solution to the classroom problems they have caused, the government chooses a smear campaign.”
He identified two additional falsehoods in the government release. One, a claim that there is an injunction at one work site preventing picketers from blocking school buses. There is no such injunction and the picketers have agreed not to block buses.
And, two, that CUPE pressured a nursing agency whose employees had been contracted by a school board to administer medications to students. There was no pressure from CUPE. The agency, which said it had no idea it had been asked to replace striking workers, pulled out when it became apparent its employees were being asked to scab.
“The timing of the UCP attack is to draw attention away from five strike votes happening right now, and the release of recent polling data showing UCP supporters don’t even side with the government when it comes to the strike and education issues,” Gill’s statement said.
About 4,000 CUPE members in the Edmonton area and Fort McMurray are on strike, and an additional 2,350 in Calgary and other communities have just taken strike votes.
Well, there’s nothing like attacking “union leaders in Ontario” when parents are yelling at your MLAs about having to send their kids to school through picket lines that are there because you’ve not-so-secretly ordered school boards not to pay employees a living wage, and when you’ve also got the most respected newspaper left in the country breathing down your neck about the metastasizing Dodgy Contracts Scandal.
Speaking of which, Globe journalists Carrie Tait and Alanna Smith, who last week broke the original story about former Alberta Health Services CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos’s serious allegations of interference in AHS contracts on behalf of private companies by UCP-connected officials, published another report saying Health Minister Adriana LaGrange stripped AHS of the power to negotiate such deals after Mentzelopoulos raised concerns internally about the contracts.
In response, Alberta Friends of Medicare published a statement calling for LaGrange to step aside immediately. “We do not believe any proper independent investigations can happen unless she does,” said FoM Executive Director Chris Gallaway.
Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi also weighed in. “If these allegations are true, Adriana LaGrange, with the apparent support of the premier and her office, ordered the coverup of investigations into the worst corruption Alberta has ever seen.”
Meanwhile, Premier Danielle Smith is still conveniently unreachable, out of the country while supposedly trying with other Canadian premiers to talk the Trump Administration out of slapping more tariffs on Canada.
When Arts, Culture and Status of Women Minister Tanya Fir and Children and Family Services Minister Searle Turton were aggressively questioned by reporters at a news conference on an unrelated topic yesterday, they repeatedly fell back on the UCP code of silence.
In Fir’s words, “Government takes these allegations very seriously and that’s why the premier has written to the auditor-general requesting an expedited review of this issue and we welcome the investigation of AG’s and we’re also awaiting the results of AHS’s internal review, and I won’t say anything further until we receive the results of these investigations.”
Alas for the UCP, this story appears to have legs and, if the Alberta political rumour mill is to be believed, more chapters will be published soon.
In that rarest of political events in Alberta, LaGrange was actually confronted by a scrum of reporters in the Alberta Legislature yesterday and told them an unnamed third party will investigate Mentzelopoulos’s allegations.
However, The Canadian Press reported that later in the day, “LaGrange’s office … clarified that the third party will assist in the review being conducted by Alberta Health Services but that overall control remains with the government.”
The story, as we used to say when daily newspapers were a thing, continues.
Support rabble today!
We’re so glad you stopped by! Thanks for consuming rabble content this year.
rabble.ca is 100% reader and donor funded, so as an avid reader of our content, we hope you will consider gifting rabble with a donation during our summer fundraiser today.
Whether it be a one-time donation or a small monthly contribution, your support is critical to keep rabble writers producing the work you’ve come to rely on as a part of a healthy media diet.
Become a rabble rouser — donate to rabble.ca today.
Nick Seebruch, editor
