Municipal Solutions

Municipal Solutions is happy to support Larry Cann's comments in support of the importance of skills education.

Municipal Solutions totally echoes and supports the comments made by UA Canada's John Telford.

Regional Talk By John Mutton Quite often living in a blue collar town like Oshawa and most of Durham, you have seen that labour related bumper stickers that say, "live better, work union."... At first thought, I would think of wages, benefits and a possible pension plan as being items that would mean "live better." It has often been said that bad management has created the need for strong unions, however today I am going to tell you what the union movement in the construction trades have done to put a new spin on the "live better, work union." My firm recently completed a study of all construction related serious injuries or deaths in Alberta and the results are astonishing. Alberta had 69 serious injuries or deaths that have closed investigations. Of those 69, all 69 were on non union construction sites leading to my new twist on the old saying being simply "Live! Work Union." Not being one that could let this statistic go as part of our work with federal Occupational Health and Safety in the US (OSHA) and Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) in each province in Canada we dove deeper into OHS/OSHA violations in North America. Again, the results are staggering, of all the OHS/OSHA violations 82 percent of them occurred with non union constructors compared to 18 percent on the union side. Why is this? The answer is very simple, the Union construction men and women are guaranteed to be licensed, certified and qualified in the scope and practice of their trade. Significant dollars go into Health and Safety to ensure that the worker is not only highly skilled, but a standard for excellence in producing a workplace that is void of even the smallest OHS/OSHA infraction. The Ontario College of Trades is a compliment to Ontario. It ensures that only licensed and certified trades are on the job. If Tim Hudak had his way, the Ontario College of Trades would be eliminated and that is at the risk of the loss of life and limb as we can see from the analysis above.. Till next week...

BC Premier Christy Clark speaking at the Liquid Natural Gas conference in Vancouver May 20, 2014. Municipal Solutions and our partner clients were proud to contribute to this fantastic event.