Senate amends RCMP union bill
Unionization drive will have the summer to persuade MPs to accept legislation changes
OTTAWA— A unionization drive by two competing factions seeking to represent Canada’s Mounties is getting underway in earnest after the Senate approved big changes to a government bill to allow the firstever RCMP union.
By a voice vote, senators overwhelmingly approved Tuesday an amended version of Bill C-7 and threw it back to the Commons to accept or reject. That won’t happen until the fall because MPs have adjourned for the summer recess.
“We will be reviewing the amendments made at committee and following the broader debate on C-7 once it returns to the House,” said Dan Brien, spokesman for Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale.
Goodale’s bill was rewritten by a Senate committee last week to broaden the scope of bargaining talks, to allow a wider range of grievances to go before an arbitrator or a public service labour relations board, and to ensure a secret ballot whenever a bargaining agent finally stands up to be certified.
Parliament’s summer-long pause now gives the two national groups vying to become that bargaining agent a few more months to persuade MPs — especially those on the government side — to accept the changes.
More importantly, it gives them more time to mobilize an estimated 16,700 Mounties to join an association — something that many frontline members appear hesitant to do.
To date, only a few thousand have done so. Brian Sauvé, co-founder and spokesman for one of those groups — the National Police Federation — said in an interview Tuesday that the NPF has so far signed up about 2,300 members.
The rival group, Mounted Police Professional Association of Canada, will not divulge its numbers signed up to date “based on the legal counsel we have received,” said spokesman Rob Creasser.
Last year, the MPPAC represented about 2,000 Mounties when it was the umbrella for three provincial associations: the Mounted Police Associations of Ontario, B.C. and Quebec, which at the Supreme Court of Canada successfully won the right to collective bargaining for all Mounties.
Since that time, its Ontario group, the MPAO, has broken away and opted to join forces with the National Police Federation, led by several former elected representatives with the RCMP’s now-defunct staff relations representative program, Sauvé among them. The MPPAC is made up of the remaining British Columbia members.
The Mounted Police Association of Quebec is biding its time to see which emerges as the lead association.
Sauvé said his group hopes to meet with the Quebec and B.C. groups this summer to “sit down with them to come to a unified front on pay and benefits, how we’re going to deal with the commissioner and the minister of public safety, etc.”
Each group has expressed suspicions about the other, while thousands of Mounties have signed onto a private Facebook group to sort through their competing arguments.
Sauvé added it is all complicated because Mounties must get up to speed on their unionization choices “on their own time.” There is no instruction or advice coming from RCMP headquarters, which cannot interfere in the process.
RCMP officers are scattered in more than 700 detachments, across Canada and internationally. The groups seeking to certify must build their own database of names, emails and addresses, as RCMP management did not supply that information, citing concerns any participation could be called an unfair labour practice.