Once upon a time, in a period more amicable I suppose, workers providing service delivery for Community Living Renfrew County South were given a $100 gift card at Christmas, courtesy of management.
This is an enlightened and positive example of how creative and thoughtful management can keep morale humming in a workplace, especially one where the workers appear to make less money than their public service counterparts across the province. So in that sense, the gift card represents to me a management that’s interested in the well-being of its staff.
I’ve stated before the enormous cost incurred by somebody to pay replacement workers $4/hour more than striking workers while having their meals, lodging, and transportation all paid for, a situation entering its seventh week.
I’ve also pointed out the hiring of security guards and private investigators, another group having their wages, meals, lodging, and transportation costs all paid for.
The question I have is a simple one: Paid for by whom?
It appears CLRCS’s Executive Director Jennifer Lavallee is feeling the heat. In fact, it appears the Board of Directors is feeling the heat as well.
Go figure.
Lavallee peppered the email inboxes of some community members and supporters with a statement indicating that she is entirely flabbergasted by the “campaign” she claims has been launched at OPSEU’s request, a campaign reliant upon the input of what she describes as a “questionable” source.
The government of Ontario would have us believe that the labour dispute between Community Loving Renfrew County South and its workers represented by OPSEU Local 472 is strictly and exclusively a matter between the employer and the employees.
Which of course is a laughable attempt at a smokescreen.
What we are actually seeing is the weaponization of essential public service delivery for exclusively partisan political objectives. It’s a Conservative thing.
The labour dispute between between Family Living Renfrew County South and OPSEU Local 472 has been noticeable to local residents primarily due to the picket lines and the visibility walks implemented by the union. It’s hard to ignore the flags, the chants, and the blaring horns of supportive motorists passing by.
Nobody, I’d venture, is in the mood to be doing any happy honking at the people exclusively responsible for all of this on the management side, particularly the executive director and her enabling Board of Directors.
People and passers-by see strikers. They’ve seen those strikers for five weeks already, with a really hot sixth week already two days in. They think that’s a long time. Too long of a time. And they begin to start asking questions. Questions around what the hold-up is, and who might be responsible.
They see strikers on a work action in its sixth week.
I caught wind that members of OPSEU Local 472 were having a get-together at the splash pad over at Ma-Te-Way. There was talk of a barbecue. This is the kind of thing, the prospect of free burgers, that has me coming over the neighbour’s fence every time.
And so I crashed the party.
And despite the fact that I’m largely unknown to these people, they had no problem with me milling about with them. Hell, they even fed me.
It’s been well-documented that the CLRCS Executive-Director has had little to say about the status of the Labour dispute between the agency she fronts and its unionized workforce, the members of OPSEU Local 472.
The status of these negations can be accurately represented by the number zero, which is perfect, because that’s exactly how much effort she’s put into this whole thing, now approaching the end of its fifth week.
When it comes to the Board of Directors overseeing the administration of Community Living Renfrew County South, it becomes readily apparent that there are an awful lot of linkages to a long-standing local construction company, that being M. Sullivan and Sons.
Fully four of the eight-person membership have direct links to Sullivan. Two others are connected to Magellan Aerospace. One board member is connected to both.
I will not, in any way, make any attempt to disparage any of these people or minimize the terrific work they do behind the scenes in this community and in Arnprior. If it were not for people like these, life would be more of a challenge for those of us beset by disadvantages, be they mental or physical.
Seniority as it applies to the workplace is a concept that’s been around for as long as collective bargaining has existed as the primary means of bridging the gap between employers and employees.
It involves the fundamental recognition of employees who have put significant time and effort into an organization being able to arrive at working conditions best suited for them. A reward for continued service if you will, where an employee may have some influence over their working conditions.
Pip: Welcome to NEWSMAGRENFREW — where the news is local, the stakes are real, and apparently some people need a Supreme Court ruling explained to them twice.
Mara: CLARION has been deep in the weeds on the OPSEU Local 472 strike — the workers, the government's strategy, the executive director at the center of it, and a doctored photo that says more than it intended to. Let's start with the labour dispute itself.
Where Jennifer Isn't — And Why That Matters
Mara: The question at the heart of this story is simple: why won't management show up? OPSEU Local 472 members have been on the picket line for weeks, asking for retroactive pay they were awarded by the Supreme Court of Canada, and the employer has largely refused to engage.
Pip: The post "WHERE ARE YOU, JENNIFER?" puts a name to that absence — Jennifer Lavallee, Executive Director of Community Living Renfrew County South — and frames her role plainly: "She's just been given the task of doing the government's dirty work, that being their point negotiator in a contract dispute with her employees."
Mara: And the consequence is that a five-week picket line has produced almost nothing. The editor's note clarifies she did eventually offer to meet — but explicitly ruled out wages, seniority, and working conditions as topics. Which is to say, she offered to meet about nothing.
Pip: "OPSEU 472 FIGHTING FOR FAIRNESS AND RESPECT" fills in the broader picture. These workers haven't seen a raise above one percent since 2019, when Bill 124 capped public sector wages — legislation the Supreme Court later struck down as unconstitutional. Larger unions like teachers and nurses collected their retroactive six-point-five percent years ago. Local 472, representing roughly four thousand workers province-wide, is still waiting.
Mara: The piece on government cynicism — "GOVERNMENT CYNICISM PROLONGS A NEEDLESS STRIKE" — explains the calculus directly. The government won't move on teachers because a teachers strike is politically catastrophic. These workers are judged to be smaller, less powerful, and easier to outlast.
Pip: Meanwhile, the province is paying replacement workers four dollars an hour more than the striking employees make, putting them up in hotels, covering meals and transport, and hiring private investigators to surveil picketers. The math on "fiscal conservatism" gets interesting fast.
Mara: The fourth piece, "TAKING THE MONEY OUT OF JENNIFER'S HANDS," tries to be fair to Lavallee — genuinely asking whether wages were ever hers to negotiate, or whether that's handled at the provincial level. The conclusion is that even granting her that, the non-wage issues — seniority, working conditions, advancement — appear to be squarely within her authority. And on those, she has chosen silence.
Pip: So the strategy, as laid out, is to wait until workers are desperate enough to accept the retroactive pay and quietly surrender everything else they've bargained for over years.
Mara: The post puts it plainly: "This is not good-faith bargaining, it is an intentional sabotage of the collective bargaining process." And it notes the Board of Directors is increasingly implicated in that posture as well.
Pip: Which brings us to the question of what the government does when the optics get bad — because someone tried to fix those too.
The Photo That Wasn't
Mara: "A DOCTORED PHOTO IS THE BEST THEY CAN DO?" documents what happened after OPSEU members flooded the Ford Nation picnic and drowned out the premier. The Attorney-General and a Tory MPP posted an image to social media showing a crowd dressed in PC blue. The Toronto Star's photo of the same event shows the crowd was overwhelmingly wearing OPSEU purple.
Pip: The post calls it "another sad example of a government that can no longer be trusted with simple and basic truths." When you can't win the room, apparently you recolor it.
Mara: And that pattern — the deflection, the managed messaging, the official line that this is strictly "a matter between the employer and the union" — connects directly back to what the striking workers have been facing from the start.
Pip: A Supreme Court ruling, five weeks on a picket line, and a doctored photo. Renfrew County's having a week.
Mara: The workers are still out there. More to follow.
