While Premier Doug Ford is campaigning to keep his job, the Canadian Union of Public Employees are urging voters to give the Progressive Conservative Party leader a pink slip when election day rolls around this week.
The union, which represents workers in many sectors, including municipal workers in St. Catharines, Thorold, Niagara-on-the-Lake and Pelham, as well as contract academic workers such as teaching assistants, and ESL instructors at Brock University among others.
Morgan Crosby, a teaching assistant at Brock and a member of CUPE Local 4207, and Rory Bourgeois, president of CUPE Local 150, which represents outside workers for the City of St. Catharines, were busy on a recent Thursday delivering posters and talking to CUPE members about the campaign.
The campaign is aimed at the 290,000 members of CUPE locals across the province. Crosby and Bourgeois are working as “member mobilizers” in Niagara.
“We're trying to talk to as many members as possible — CUPE members — about the upcoming election so we can have a better voter turnout,” Crosby said.
The Fire the Boss, Fire Doug Ford campaign features a 90-second satirical video where an actor playing a boss that is clearly the premier, fumbling through a stack of cards and offering up excuses for issues, such as shortage of healthcare workers (it’s the federal government) and the high cost of food (it’s just inflation).
“It is because of the attacks that he's made on workers, like with Bill 124,” Crosby said.
“Bill 28 was the other one, where they both illegally attacked workers’ rights,” Bourgeois added.
Bill 124 limited wage increases for public sector workers and was ruled as unconstitutional by the Ontario Court of Appeal while Bill 28, which prohibited strikes by education workers. That shows Ford is no friend to workers, Crosby said.
“There's nothing to say that, like he won't (try to take away rights from workers) again,” Crosby said. “We’re just kind of reminding members and people — and our members in particular that he has attacked workers’ rights before.”
In conversations he has been having, Bourgeois said he’s been hearing a lot of concerns from members about the state of health care.
“I'm hearing a lot about hospital wait times, just in general, conversations with people,” Bourgeois said. “There are a lot of horror stories, I find that's an area that we, CUPE, has a lot of workers in hospitals … but it is an area where people are just experiencing it in everyday life.”
The duo will continue their outreach.
“We're talking to different locals in the area and trying to get to their (general membership meetings) and talk to members there, because then it's a bigger audience,” Crosby said.
CUPE has come out in support of the NDP, which currently represents three of Niagara’s four electoral districts, represented by Wayne Gates (Niagara Falls), Jeff Burch (Niagara Centre) and Jeannie Stevens (St. Catharines). Only Niagara West with incumbent Progressive Conservative MPP Sam Oosterhoff bucking the trend.
Provincially, the goal of the campaign is to remind workers, and all voters, of Ford’s record.
“Doug Ford wants to make this election about anything but his own record of failure,” said Yolanda McClean, CUPE Ontario’s secretary-treasurer. “But workers aren’t falling for it.”
Ontario heads to the polls on Thursday.