Friday, January 30, 2015
On January 19, AMAPCEO President Dave Bulmer wrote to the Minister of Labour, Kevin Flynn, expressing concern about a serious situation that is developing at the Grievance Settlement Board (GSB).
As you may know, the GSB handles grievance mediation and arbitrations for employees covered under the Crown Employees Collective Bargaining Act (CECBA). This includes AMAPCEO in the Ontario Public Service (OPS), as well as OPSEU, PEGO and some other public sector unions in Ontario. The GSB is administered jointly by the GSB Governance Council, on which AMAPCEO, OPSEU and the other unions have representation, along with the OPS Employer and other public sector employers like the WSIB.
The Ontario Government has recently accepted the Canada Revenue Agency’s position that the GSB Chair and the 30 Vice-Chairs, who are part-time Order-in-Council (OIC) appointees, should now be treated more like employees for tax-purposes. While some of these changes are effective in 2015, some are actually being retroactively applied.
As a result, the GSB Vice-Chairs in January refused to release any new dates for the parties to schedule disputes to proceed to mediation or arbitration. This is causing an unnecessary crisis at the GSB that could cause justice to be delayed to many grievors. Ultimately, it could also place our entire GSB system of labour justice at risk.
An emergency GSB Governance Council meeting was held on Wednesday, January 21, where this matter was discussed. A further Governance Council meeting has been scheduled for February 6, where the unions hope that the OPS Employer representatives will have some answers on how it plans to deal with this crisis.
We will keep you abreast of developments on this matter.
For more information on the Grievance Settlement Board, please access its website here.