Please note: the Victoria RWC AGM, originally scheduled for January 8th, has been postponed until January 29th due to the weather. Click here for details.

The Campbell government's plan to privatize both the Medical Services Plan (MSP) and Pharmacare systems puts in jeopardy:

• Our right to the absolute security and confidentiality of our personal medical information through the public control of MSP and Pharmacare;
• Our right to a public not-for-profit health care system as granted to us under the Canada Health Act; and 
• Our sovereign right to a public not-for-profit health care system protected from the negative trade implications of NAFTA and other international trade agreements;

Read and sign the petition here - visit www.righttoprivacycampaign.com for more info (links open in new window).

OTTAWA - The Public Service Alliance of Canada Social Justice Fund will contribute a minimum amount of $175,000 to disaster relief to victims and to rebuilding efforts in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami in South Asia and Africa.

“The members of our union, like all Canadians, have been greatly affected   by the immense suffering and devastation experienced by the people of South Asia and Africa,” said PSAC President Nycole Turmel.  “There have been so many lives lost and millions left homeless without food, clean water and vulnerable to disease. We hope that our contribution, made on behalf of all 150,000 PSAC members, to the international relief effort will help bring much needed immediate support as well as help in the reconstruction of devastated communities and economies.”

Read more here.

Please take a few minutes today to send an email to Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe Velez to urge him to investigate the assassinations of fifteen trade unionists over the last five years. No one has ever been charged or tried for these politically-motivated killings. Visit this page (link to cupe.ca opens in new window). 

Send your letter and please forward this linke to a friend or someone you know will share your concern about human rights.

A forum on the intensifying human rights violations in the country since the U.S designated the Philippines as the “second front” in the “war on terror”. Thursday, January 20, 2005, 6:30 – 8:30 PM. YWCA, Welch Rm. 1 (4th Flr.), 535 Hornby St. Vancouver. Entrance by donation.

The “Hacienda Luisita Massacre” (link to labourstart.org opens in new window) on Nov. 16, 2004 left seven people dead and hundreds of striking workers injured when Philippine police and military opened fire to disperse them. This latest incident caps a year of rampant human rights violations committed under the U.S.-backed Arroyo regime.

Read more here.

The REVP's office has 6 extra tickets to the Vancouver & District Labour Council's Robbie Burns dinner, January 21 - more details here - if you would like one please call Christine @ 604 430 0191, first come first served.

January 17th

Jacquie Hepner and Harry Monk have both shared their presentations made at the meeting: electronic copies are available on the Human Rights Committee minutes page.

Final Offer Vote Times and Locations:

Vancouver: Thursday, January 27th, YWCA Royal Bank Room, 733 Beatty St, 11AM, 12 noon and 5PM

Richmond: Friday, January 28th, Mayfair Lakes Golf Club Boardroom, 5460 No. 7 Road, 11AM and 12 noon.

Janet May and Shelly MacKintosh will give a presentation at the indicated times.

Northern Women's Cttee and North Central AC: The next meeting will be January 18th, in Prince George: delegates to the BC Regional Convention will be selected. Agenda and details are here.

Surrey / Delta / Langley AC: The next meeting will be January 25th: delegates to the BC Regional Convention will be selected. Agenda and details are here.

Vancouver Regional Womens Committee: The next meeting will be January 18th: delegates to the BC Regional Convention will be selected. Agenda and details are here.

Southern Vancouver Island AC: The AGM will be January 25th: delegates to the BC Regional Convention will be selected. Agenda and details are here.

Your negotiation team met with the employer January 17-19, 2005 inclusive.  The first two days were spent presenting and providing some rationale to the employer on our bargaining proposal package.  These proposals are designed to improve your rights and benefits in several areas including; staffing, classification, leave provisions, scheduling, overtime, grievance procedure, hours of work, benefit plans and issues related to trades.

Read more here.

Nominations for delegates to the April 8-10 convention are now closed. Ballots will be mailed out this week and next. Marked ballots must be received back at the Vancouver PSAC office by Friday, February 25 in order to be counted. Narratives for nominees are listed, by area, on the web. Hard copies are also being mailed to all Locals, National Officers, Regional Council members and all PSAC committees.

Click for the list of automatic delegates and nominees.

Click for the Delegate Candidate's statements.

Since the 2005 round of Regional Conventions are the first ones at which the REVPs and Alternate REVPs will be elected it became necessary to write rules around the election process, since the Regional By-laws do not currently contain any items around the REVP and A/REVP elections.  It is also important that the process be similar, if not identical in all 7 regions of Canada.  At it's January 15-16, 2005 meeting, the BC Regional Council voted in Regulation 7 shown below. If you are interested in running for the position of REVP or Alternate REVP for BC, please read this Regulation carefully for the appropriate procedure.  Any questions should be directed to Joanna Schultz, the BC Regional Coordinator.  She can be reached at: 604-430-5631 or 1-800-663-1655.

Upon completion of the delegate elections and upon request from a candidate for REVP or A/REVP one set of delegate address labels will be made available to candidates. Please direct your request to Joanna Schultz.

REGULATION_7.pdf

OTTAWA - Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) members at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have ratified their tentative agreement by a vote of 90%. 

“Since the creation of the Agency, wages and benefits for these members haven’t kept pace with other federal public sector workers,” says PSAC National President Nycole Turmel.  “While we were not able to achieve complete parity in this round, we did negotiate wage adjustments, as well as benefit improvements that will significantly reduce the disparity.”

PSAC CFIA members in the operational categories will see their salaries adjusted from between 5.4% to 9.6%, effective January 1, 2003, in order to reduce the wage gap identified in the joint PSAC/Treasury Board Wage Study. Their pay zones will be reduced from four to three.  The salary rates for three administrative groups (AS, IS and PM) will be put on a par with rates paid to similar occupational groups at Treasury Board, retroactive to January 1, 2003, while other members will receive an additional salary increment.

Economic increases negotiated are:  2.5% retroactive to January 1, 2003, 2.25% retroactive to January 1, 2004, 2.4% effective January 1, 2005 and 2.5% as of January 1, 2006.

Two new days of leave were included in the settlement, as well as remuneration for “captive time”.  In the new agreement, part-time workers will now be entitled to a salary increment after 12 months.  

The vote was conducted among the bargaining unit’s 4,500 members across Canada in December and January. The new agreement will expire on December 31, 2006.

January 27, 2005 : FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Click for CFIA results.

OTTAWA - The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) will be signing collective agreements with Treasury Board for over 100,000 of its members, removing the threat of a recurrence of the country-wide strikes that took place last summer and fall.

PSAC National President Nycole Turmel announced the vote results today, following an extensive series of membership vote meetings which began last December.

According to Turmel, PSAC members in the Operational Services Group (Table 2) have ratified their tentative agreement by 90%, and the members in the Education and Library Science Group (Table 5) have also ratified their agreement by 92%.

PSAC members in the Program and Administrative Services Group (Table 1) and in the Technical Services Group (Table 3) were voting on the final offer presented by Treasury Board.  Those offers were accepted by 72% at Table 1 and 76% at Table 3.

According to Turmel, “this was not an easy round of bargaining, and while some gains were made, employer demands for concessions and relatively low economic increases were on the table.”

“The gains we made during this round of bargaining were thanks in large part to the readiness of our members to take strike action,” says Turmel. “Our Table 2 members, for example, knew that a significant wage gap had been identified between their wages and those in the private and public sectors and they took the necessary action to force the government to put adjustments of 2.6% to 19% on the table, in addition to general economic increases.”

PSAC represents about 80,000 members in the Program and Administrative Services Group, 10,000 members in each of the Operational Services and Technical Services Groups and 1,000 members in the Education and Library Science Group. The new collective agreements will expire on various dates in June and August, 2007.

January 27th - 5:15 pm

Most of the accolades for this terrific BC webpage (the best PSAC pages in the country!) must go to Patrick Bragg, our own web "god" who posts articles and events with lightning speed and who is always looking for ways to make members dealings with the PSAC easier, at least technology-wise.  Without his technical knowledge we would just be ho-hum.  Kudos also to Sister Patricia Mullin who is Patrick's eager apprentice.
Thanks Patrick and Patricia - for all your hard work and for making the BC region shine in cyberspace.

January 27th

The new BC Regional website was launched on January 27th, 2004. We want to thank you all for visiting over the last year, and for your suggestions and ideas. Special thanks to everyone who maintained their Local's pages and sent in news, upcoming events, and photos. Remember, this is your website: if you have anything that might be of interest to PSAC members in BC, feel free to email us. Here are some interesting* numbers ...

• Almost 500 photos were uploaded to the Parks, CRA, TB and PSAC photo galleries.
• Over 300 members applied on-line for PSAC courses.
• We've posted 1371 Wobjects, or items of one type or another.
• psacbc.com served 42 thousand pages and transferred 40659445 kB of data - enough to fit on 56 CDRs - last year
• Our busiest day was Oct 14th - the end of the TB strike - our webhosting company told us we were using 1000 times our normal bandwidth/CPU. The website was down for an hour while they made adjustments.
• The most popular page (other than this one) varies from month to month, but is usually the education page or one of the various bargaining pages.

Cheers!

January 31st

Last week some of you will have received a large envelope from the Vancouver PSAC office which contains the biographical information of all candidates for delegates across BC.  As the covering memo explains, this information was sent to all locals, RVPS, Regional Council members, Area Councils, committees, etc..  We mailed this information out to the above recipients so they could provide information to members if they can't access the web, where the bios are also posted. 

Your ballot will come in a separate envelope which will contain the ballot, voting instructions and 2 envelopes. Click for the delegate candidate's statements.

Some of you belong to province-wide locals that have members all over BC.  Since we had no way of determining where your work site is, all we could go by was your residence address and you were sent a ballot for your residence geographic area. In the Lower Mainland we have many members with work sites in one geographic area and residences in another, e.g. work in Vancouver, live in Surrey. 

If you have received a ballot for a geographic area that you live in, but would rather vote for someone in the geographic area where your workaday is - please call Christine at 604-430-0191 or by email at beynonc@psac.com and we will email you a ballot for your workaday geographic area (you can only vote in 1 area).