Finance minister’s new approach sounds like more of the same public sector blaming

One would like to believe newly installed Finance Minister Randy Delorey meant it. Last week he told union leaders representing teachers, health care workers, paramedics and assorted clusters of government employees he wanted to meet to discuss a “new approach” to collective bargaining. There are more than 300 collective agreements slated for re-negotiation this year, […]

Stephen McNeil declares health care victory… and runs

What better time to declare victory and slink off to bind your wounds than just before cocktail hour on the Friday afternoon before school March break and the eve of another Sunday nor’easter? (It’s no coincidence two of the top four Google News search terms modifying “Nova Scotia” Saturday morning were “weather and “storm;” “health […]

Health care unions, the government and the mess that will be

Really? Last year, the McNeil government passed the Health Authorities Act, ostensibly (and laudably) to streamline the province’s health care system, but also (and shabbily) to game that system. The legislation reduced the number of health districts from 10 to two, and the number of collective bargaining units from 50 to four. But the government’s […]

Health care unions: arbitrator’s report unlikely to be the end of the story

By this time next week, government-appointed mediator-arbitrator Jim Dorsey is expected to hand down his final report into which health care worker should be represented by which health care union. His choices seem limited. The Health Authorities Act — which the McNeil government introduced last fall as part of its promise to merge nine district […]

Leo Glavine: Mis-speaking oneself while saying the same thing

On Thursday, in the warm afterglow of a Throne speech that zeroed in on “unsustainable [public sector] wage increases” and promised a “hiring slow down and steps to achieve a more sustainable wage pattern,” Health Minister Leo Glavine was clear as glass. Premier Stephen McNeil’s government had had it up to here with recalcitrant health […]

State of the union

“SOMEONE TO SEE YOU.” Mike Hachey didn’t have time. Not today. He was in the process of sorting through paperwork dregs from last week’s Atlantic Lottery commercial shoot, planning a Canada Games event wrap-up, juggling planned/hoped-for/maybe pitches for future projects and overseeing – from the afar of Halifax – renovations at his company’s Moncton office. […]

Nursing shortage? Why is the government making it worse?

So… Faced with a looming shortage of “several thousand” nurses over the next decade as our population both ages and also shrinks (read the Ivany Report; look around you), our new Liberal government responds by… Well, let me count the ways. The government alienates many current nurses by dismissing their concerns about patient safety as […]

Paramedics can’t strike, but that doesn’t cure what ails a sick system

Now that the government has legislatively punted the possibility of a paramedics strike into the hands of a pick-one arbitrator — who will have to choose between dueling union and management last-best offers for wages and working conditions over the next three to five years — it’s time to ask ourselves a question. What’s wrong […]

07/08/2013
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Jamie Baillie offside… as usual

Forget the Byzantine balls-up the attempt to unionize Canada’s junior hockey players became—league-hired private investigators snooping on union staff, falsely (maybe) intimating one was a felon; union (dis)organizers scheduling, then canceling votes—and ask ourselves two simple questions: First, do run-of-the-litter junior hockey players, the ones least likely to lose millions in the next NHL lockout, […]

Heath care contract: adding and subtracting

Last week’s to-the-edge-of-the-ledge, past-the-last-minute contract settlement between Capital Health and its 3,600 health workers raises all sorts of difficult but intriguing questions. The first, and most immediate, of course, is could the disruption—even without an actual strike, the anticipation cancelled 560 elective surgeries and emptied 172 beds—have been avoided? The short answer is probably not. […]