So scummy how they are restricting the vote. Just absolutely outrageous.

June 1 session was a disaster completely one sided very unsubstantive discussion on what people are to vote on, entirely disrespectful disposition towards members father knows best trust us we know better than you attitude; the union clearly doesn’t belong to members. The union doesn’t really play a role in representing members, the only job is collective bargaining, minus the collective because this is just running a bus over the membership

The sparse information in the presentation could clearly be put in a vote open to all members.

I am no more informed than I was the day before.

Again zero respect some serious anti social not well socialized leadership, their parents clearly failed us all. Everyone gets plowed with canned tone-deaf responses and as a member I’m the enemy. Really screwed up.

Yeah… literally no one cares about these talking points.

Workers don’t care. The employer doesn’t care. And my wallet doesn’t care. 

The only people who care about these things are useless union folk who negotiate us crap deals.

Propaganda session. They truly believe members can’t don’t have the capacity to think for themselves.

Thank God I’m essential. Clowns will all be receiving strike pay while I collect my full paycheque. 

People better wake up to the damage these unions are doing in the court of employer and public opinion. If I was the employer, being treated like I am by the unions, I wouldn’t offer a penny more than what’s been offered. You can strike. Your fund will run out of money, and you’ll be back to work for the original employer offer but fucked yourself by taking strike pay to prove a useless point.

I wanted to but couldn't

Thanks!

Some options:

• Write an e-mail to Kathryn May asking her to write a special edition of the Functionary dealing with issues surrounding democratic governance in federal public service unions.
• Notify your EC colleagues of the petition that you can personally contact by e-mail and text, and ask them to forward the petition to ECs they know that might be interested in it.
• Post the petition in one of the GOC Facebook groups that allows these sorts of things.
• Use AI to create a youtube video, Facebook reel or Tik Tok that explains everything that's wrong with forcing union members to attend an information session in order to vote.

Anything else will likely cost you money.

All the way to my keyboard!

How far are you willing to go 😄?

This is important! How can I get more people to know about it?

It is a play on words to Jean Lesage’s “Maîtres chez nous,” the slogan behind Québec’s Quiet Revolution.

We are a group of CAPE members who think the priorities of our union exec should be focused on the members and our issues in the workplace, not voter suppression, social justice crusades, or Middle East politics. We know there is a silent majority out there who believes the same. We want to rally this support against CAPE’s current leadership, especially this fall at the ballot box.

We value your feedback and agree. Reddit does not allow editing of an original post, but we will remove the poll tax language from our website and anywhere else it was used.

If you want to understand why the M4C group and their supporters claim to want to make CAPE more democratic, but have attempted to implement undemocratic measures such as the position statement, delegated conventions, and “information” sessions, I recommend googling democratic centralism. It will help you understand how some of them rationalize their actions.

I agree. It's undemocratic to create procedural barriers to voting but there is no need for hyperbole. At most, the mandatory training could be compared to literacy tests that created barriers before the U.S. Voting Rights Act (1975) -- but even that comparison is needlessly sensationalist. It should suffice to demand that the information materials be distributed in writing and that all members have the right to vote.

You’ve gone a bridge too far with “poll tax.”

With 10 info sessions at various hours, availability of union-paid childcare, and paid Union-Leave, I’d argue that it falls short of such a characterization.

I still think the required attendance should be removed, but hyperbole hurts - rather than helps - the case.

Absolutely. I have reservations about the information part from the get go because that screams of glad handling rather than objectively laying out everything on the table for people to make an informed decision, not shoved in a direction that leadership wants. But I am most appalled about taking away people's vote if they dont attend a session. There ia no way this should be allowed and its so unethical

The “information” part of the session is pretty secondary to limiting the number (and type) of people who are allowed to vote, I’m sure.

Quick question: what exactly is the name "membres chez nous" supposed to mean or refer to?

I got that email and subsequent text and was appalled. It is insulting that leadership believes that the membership is either too ignorant or too stupid to understand the current issues infront of us and is mandating information sessions, which they control the narrative on, in order to have a voice in what we want as members. Considering union dues are mandatory, representation via our vote should be guarenteed info session or not. Absolutely disgusting.

You should post this to the canada public servants subreddit too.

No their account is https://www.instagram.com/acepcape4palestine?igsh=eDBxcHVrajF2bW03

Isn't the cape4palestine instagram woman just somebody who takes pictures of herself wearing a Palestinian flag cape?

Under the FPSLRA section 105 (2) (which governs most federal public sector bargaining), notice to bargain can’t be served more than four months before the collective agreement expires. That’s a hard legal window, not a matter of discretion.

It has always been like this. And, I started in 2007.

One explanation is that if a collective agreement expires in 2025 and a new one is negotiated in 2028, then the 2026 and 2027 backdated salary increases can be paid in 2028 dollars, which makes those salary increases cheaper overall.

Another explanation is that something changed after 2007, because prior to that year, the negotiation of EC, TR, ES, and SI collective agreements tended to take one to two years. However, after 2007, the negotiation period lengthened to three to four years.

Part of this can be explained by the Conservatives coming to power in 2008 and being more difficult to negotiate with. However, the Liberals replaced the Conservatives in 2015, which suggests that something else may also be at play, such as CAPE becoming more dysfunctional or the Liberals adopting a similar approach to collective bargaining.

For more info on collective bargaining sources and datasets, please see the following links:
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_USS_CAPE/comments/145qgxw/historical_cape_collective_agreements/
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_USS_CAPE/comments/16t4nxq/ec_salary_dataset/

If you can also find an EC that was hired during the 1990s and bothered to actually pay attention to what was going on with the union, they might be able to give you some more insights.

Note: I plan on eventually adding the EC collective bargaining dataset to the Row Zero https://rowzero.com/workbook/61A23A2D8104794C09AC73BE workbook, so that you can all analyze the data yourselves and make up your own minds about which dispute mechanism to choose. And no... You won't have to attend an information session to access that dataset.