It may be a sign of something, perhaps even a sign of something good, maybe even encouraging. Or depending on the response to the initiative, it may turn out to be just another part of the journey, a journey that’s been tough for almost all concerned.
OPSEU Local 441 in Brockville and Local 472 here in Renfrew/Arnprior have called for for all parties to their current labour dispute with LLGAMH — Lanark, Leeds and Grenville Addictions and Mental Health — and CLRCS — Community Living Renfrew County South — to return to the bargaining table on July 13, 2026.
For OPSEU, the reference to meeting in Toronto may mean some involvement of the union’s provincial executive. On the management side, well, that’s where it gets interesting.
Because as far as the government and LLGAMH, and by extension our very ownCLRCS are officially concerned, the government has nothing to do with any of this, and it’s the arm’s-length agencies that are solely responsible for bargaining. If that’s true, then how do you kick this can upstairs on the management side when, by their accounting, there’s no upstairs to kick it to.
But there is.
It’s called the Ontario provincial government.
They are the “funder” referred to in the media release. They, the government, is the entity through which all money, all funding, flows. The union is squarely identifying the government as a critical party to negotiations, since it’s understood by everyone on all sides that nothing happens one way for another without the government signing off on it.
As they say in those Netflix crime shows, you have to follow the money to get to the truth.
OPSEU refers to the presence of a mediator at the proposed talks, rather than a conciliation officer. A mediator is jointly agreed-upon by both parties, rather than arbitrarily appointed by one. And while a mediator can’t compel an agreement, they can take a much more active role in the process than the figure-head conciliation officer, who sadly doesn’t even have the authority to pick the brand of ketchup, be it French’s or Heinz.
Unlike many conciliation officers, experienced labour mediators often:
- spend considerably more time with the parties,
- shuttle between separate caucus rooms
- identify creative compromises,
- challenge unrealistic bargaining positions,
- help draft possible settlement language.
With all of this said, it’s worth noting that this may end up as another nothing burger simply by the government stubbornly clinging to its failed position that it has no role in these negotiations, a charade that everyone, including themselves, can see through.
It’s the challenging of “unrealistic” bargaining positions that puts the government on the wrong foot since it’s been government strategy from the get-go to advance unreasonable bargaining positions, or no bargaining positions at all. Their stance, or the stance of their agency proxies, is to issue statements indicating all the things they want to talk about (nothing) and all the things they don’t want to talk about (everything). A mediator might throw a bit of a kink into those types of officially stated positions.
Both sides have accused the other of being the ones holding everything up, of being the ones not ready to come to the table. I’ve looked at both of the positions, and I’ve concluded that one side’s position has much more merit than the other, a conclusion also shared by others with experience in labour relations.
So let’s just say it’s a wash, and that for the sake of argument, we’ll grant that both sides do legitimately want to be at the bargaining table but are prevented from doing so owing to confusion of communication and intent.
So after allowing both sides some cover, we can now look at OPSEU’s invitation to talk as a positive step, one that starts today and never-minds all that’s been said in the past. An offer to collectively pull up the boot straps and get something done so we can get good people back to work fairly.
But, as I said, this is all dependant upon a government suddenly willing to do the right thing rather than playing a toxic game of political showmanship for its die-hard base of perpetual malcontents.
You never know. Maybe the government is feeling pressure bubbling up from the grass roots. Maybe Executive-Directors and Boards of Directors, feeling the heat themselves, are starting to make their discomfort known to the funding entity that claims non-involvement, but is involved in every aspect of this strike.
Maybe their MPPs are under pressure as well in their local constituencies. Maybe the phone’s been ringing off the hook, email inboxes filled with negative and frustrated feedback. Maybe protesters out in front of their constituency offices have them rattled, especially when some of those protests are driven by taxpayers frustrated with the government’s waste and pettiness. It’s one thing to be picketed by OPSEU workers, that much can be expected. But by non-affiliated citizens and community members? That’s a whole different story.
The government of Mr. Ford has seen its polling numbers crash badly, and they don’t like that one bit. And while falling polls may not have any significant impact here in a riding where we’d regularly elect a trash can as long as it was a Conservative trash can, it’s not the same as in other ridings, particularly the many in the Greater Toronto Area where the Tories and the hated Liberals have been in cut-throat competition since the 1990’s. There are more than a few Conservative MPPs who are beginning to get nervous about holding onto their seats, and once that kind of thing gets into the caucus room, it’s tough to beat it back.
Billy Denault will always be safe.
But go talk to the Conservative MPPs from ridings like Mississauga-Erin Mills, York South-Weston, Eglinton-Lawrence, Ajax, Brampton West, Burlington, Scarborough Centre, and Nepean. These are all ridings that the Tories won by margins of less than 1000 votes, with an alarming number being decided by single-digit margins. Two went to a judicial recount,
It’s correct that a flip of eight ridings away from the Tories wouldn’t change the fact that the Ford government would still have a majority, but that’s reading the cards all wrong.
All governments have a shelf life, and when that draws to a close, it’s a tough son-of-a-gun-of-a-thing to stop. Voter fatigue is a real thing, and it doesn’t matter what party you root for. Ford has won three majority governments, including the most recent one where he went to the polls far earlier than necessary to take advantage of favourable optics provided by an American president allowed to go off the rails..
Ford knew that by waiting for the regular election date a couple of years down the road, the path to a government, never mind a majority, might be a rougher journey, mostly to do with that voter fatigue.
Ford has made a habit of apologizing to folks for mistakes made, although I believe that to be political chimera. The electorate has even given him some credit to owning up to those mistakes, but that credit is not inexhaustible. The mistakes keep piling up, they’re almost entirely self-generated, and they’re costing Ontario taxpayers billions of dollars to fix up after the fact. It’s ironic that, despite presenting themselves as sound money managers, Conservative governments tend to crank up deficits and debts at alarming rates, more than even those so-called hated Liberals.
It seems that spending billions of dollars to attack its own citizens, its own workforce, is starting to wear pretty thin, a situation where even traditional Tory supporters have simply seen enough.
Perhaps the government sees all of this and finally determines that it needs to act in its own self-preservation. Watch the money flow when that happens.
So keep those cards and letter coming in folks. Ring up your MPP and leave him/her/them a voicemail. Walk into the constituency office to say hello. If it’s closed, stand out front and register your displeasure to the security cameras. Maybe they can read lips. Get a few neighbours together and maybe some folks from your pickle ball group to picket that very same constituency office. Bring a ball. Call it picket ball.
And despite the feeling that you’re not being listened to, please understand that you are, because they’re monitoring this closely. Their boss has put them in a tough spot, and not all of them have the luxury of being a Conservative MPP in a slam-dunk riding like ours.
This riding turned Conservative back in 2003 when John Yakabuski squeaked out a victory over the Liberal Derek Nighbor. Yakabuski held the riding for over twenty years. But no offence to Billy, but Billy Denault is no John Yakabuski.
Maybe he can be made susceptible to pressure as well.
No harm in trying.
OPSEU has made this Friday, July 10, 2026 as the deadline for the other “parties” to respond to their invitation to discussions and mediation.
I guess we’ll get a better sense of how the “funder” is going to respond.
The speculation around potential OPSEU provincial involvement is simply that, speculation, and comes from the invitation’s call for the parties to meet in Toronto.
That said, it’s okay to be optimistic, because the alternative leads nowhere.
Here we have a party clearly stating its desire to talk, only this time with a mediator for additional credibility. The deadline for acceptance is tomorrow, Friday. If LLGAMH and/or CLRCS does accept the invitation — and I don’t know that they will — then that might be the catalyst for good-faith discussions to heat up finally, something the general public wants to see..
I guess we’ll have to wait until Friday to see how CEO Gifford and Executive-0Director Lavallee respond. That response, one way or another, will be telling.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 