While CAPE and the Treasury Board are working to set mutually agreeable dates for the resumption of collective bargaining, the union’s bargaining teams are busy making preparations. The Liberal election victory and the positive signals emanating from the new government suggest that we can expect an improvement in the atmosphere around the bargaining tables.
CAPE’s bargaining teams have thus held a number of meetings to prepare for the resumption of bargaining. The first priority for both teams was to appoint new chief negotiators.
The new chief negotiator for the union side at the EC bargaining table will be Jamie Dunn, who previously worked for the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC) for more than a dozen years as a researcher, labour relations officer and negotiator. Just before leaving PIPSC to take a leadership role at a union in the municipal sector, he was manager of the team of negotiators assigned to the current round of collective bargaining.
For the TR group, CAPE approached its former president Claude Poirier and asked him to apply his experience and expertise to the role of chief negotiator on behalf of the approximately 900 translators, interpreters and terminologists it represents. Claude Poirier was president of CAPE from 2008 to 2014 and served on the EC and TR bargaining teams several times in recent years.
Both will be ably assisted by our veteran research officer, Hélène Paris.
As part of their preparation work, the bargaining teams have also started reviewing and revising their respective mandates. The political landscape has changed significantly since the union first tabled its demands in the spring of 2014, particularly with the election of a new government. The members of CAPE’s bargaining teams believe that the government’s indications that it will be giving new mandates to Treasury Board’s bargaining teams paves the way for the teams on the union side to make changes to their mandates.
Accordingly, the teams have agreed to sound out EC and TR members in early 2016 in order to identify what issues should be revisited at the resumption of bargaining. In particular, the teams want to see what can be done to enshrine the concept of protecting the analytical and scientific integrity of the work of their members, given the degree to which that integrity was compromised during the 10 year period of Conservative rule.
We will inform you as soon as we know the dates for the resumption of bargaining. Should you have any questions about collective bargaining, consult the EC and TR bargaining sections of our website.
