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.
I’ve been spending the last several days churning out articles to bring to light the important aspects of the current labour dispute between Community Living Renfrew County South and their employees belonging to Local 472 of OPSEU.
As I dig into the issues and the roadblocks, a name keeps popping up as being sort of a common denominator for everything that’s going wrong with these negotiations, which aren’t really negotiations at all, but rather a naked shakedown of employee rights.
That name belongs to CLRCS Executive Director Jennifer Lavallee.
You’ve put in the time and you’ve paid your dues. You successfully rose through the ranks of your workplace, where now you sit in the chair where real decisions are made.
You just secured a 10% raise. Hell, you’re even on the Sunshine List.
Life is looking pretty good.
But then your employer, and those senior to you, hand you an assignment that has all the appearances of a bag of shit.
It seems that Ford Nation picnic fiasco is really biting into the PC government’s ability to present themselves as good stewards of government while maintaining a straight face.
You’ll recall how Ford’s political love-fest was knocked ass-over-tea kettle last week when hundreds of OPSEU members showed up and dominated the space, drowning out the premier for the entire time he spoke. He hasn’t been this embarrassed since Toronto fans booed him during the victory parade for the NBA champion Raptors back in 2019. My God, they even cheered Justin Trudeau, also present on the same stage.
To a conservative of any sort, that sucks big time.
Regarding the current job action by public employee union OPSEU, any questions directed to one side of the issue, that being management, are met with virtually the same response.
The issue, says the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services, is strictly “a matter between the employer and the union.”
This is the brush-off line given to striking employees wanting answers, and members of the general public seeking the same. It is the official response from the ministry under which these programs are funded, and its the boilerplate response given to workers when they approached their local MPP, who for the record didn’t meet with them, but still offered a statement saying that the dispute wasn’t with the Ford government, but rather was a matter between the employer and the union.
So, let me just say that I totally agree with that statement, or would totally agree with it if it was made in good faith, which it is decidedly not.
Sadly, there Is nothing about a labour dispute that does any good for anyone. That’s even more pronounced when the dispute involves public sector employees who deal with some of society’s most disadvantaged souls, people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves needing significant care to go about the most basic of things in their lives. Things that you and think nothing about, things that are taken for granted.
And it’s most upsetting when many of those among the disadvantaged are children.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 