faculty

Wednesday November 8, 2017

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday November 8, 2017

Fourth week of Ontario college strike

The union representing striking Ontario college workers says students would soon be on their way back to classes, if the colleges hadn’t left the bargaining table this week.

The Ontario Public Sector Employees Union, representing the 12,000 college workers, held a press conference Tuesday afternoon — one day after colleges called for striking faculty to vote on a final contract offer.

Warren “Smokey” Thomas, president of OPSEU, said the union believed a deal was close after negotiations continued over the weekend.

“Then Monday morning, without any notice to us, the government dropped the bombshell of saying they were going to ask the Ministry of Labour to conduct a vote, which they get to do once during the bargaining cycle,” Thomas said to reporters at the Chelsea Hotel in downtown Toronto.  

The College Employer Council, which represents the province’s 24 colleges, asked Ontario’s Labour Relations Board Monday to schedule the vote. It also called on OPSEU to suspend the strike in the five to 10 days it will take to organize the vote.

“We made significant moves to address all of their issues,” said Sonia Del Missier, chair of the colleges’ bargaining team, on Monday. “That offer should have been accepted.”

At Tuesday’s press conference, the union maintained it would advise members to vote no.

“I thought we were close to a deal,” Thomas told reporters. (Source: CBC News) 

 

Friday April 24, 2009

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday April 24, 2009

Ignatieff comes to America, to be educated

May 2, 2009

The Leader of the Official Opposition is in town to talk with senior Obama administration and congressional figures and to deliver a speech on Afghanistan before a private audience that includes Richard Holbrooke, the President’s special envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Michael Ignatieff had dinner last night with Mr. Holbrooke as well.

The Department of Foreign Affairs would kill for this kind of access.

Mr. Ignatieff is more than a moderately important Canadian politician hoping for a photo-op with a departmental secretary and maybe a senator or two.

He used to be one of the world’s better-known public intellectuals, a man more at home in common rooms than in his too-small office on Parliament Hill.

Having taught at Harvard, having been a regular contributor to The New York Times, having acted as host on BBC programs – being, in other words, a prominent member of the transatlantic intelligentsia, equips Mr. Ignatieff with an intellectual credibility in the eyes of this administration that Prime Minister Stephen Harper simply cannot emulate.

Within any culture, the question that matters is: Is he One of Us? For the Obama administration, Mr. Ignatieff is One of Us. Mr. Harper never will be. And there’s nothing he can do about it.

During his visit, Mr. Ignatieff hopes to impress his views about Afghanistan – Canada should stop shooting at people there and work harder on rebuilding Afghan society – on Mr. Holbrooke and other figures close to the President. (Source: Globe & Mail)