2025

Unions have two main purposes. First, they offer defense services to employees who have been harmed or abused by their employers. Second, they are meant to provide collective bargaining power to employees who would individually, in theory, be taken advantage of and exploited by employers. Covid illustrated that the unions in British Columbia failed their members on both counts.

With respect to the former, a series of bad laws, one being that union membership in most public sector positions is mandatory, and the other being that members forfeit their rights to outside legal counsel, created a situation where the government, acting as the employer, could violate the rights of nurses, doctors, law enforcement officers, and with the unions refusing to defend them, they were left with no recourse. With respect to the latter, another bad law, which allowed the government to collect the member dues on behalf of the union created a situation where the union stopped caring about the wishes of the members, and focused more on the needs of the government. The BC Nurses Union, as one example, received 100M dollars from the BC NDP government in 2022, and part of that was accepting a plan to bring in more foreign nurses, thereby undermining their own member's bargaining power.

All of these bad laws need to be repealed. Union membership, across the board, must once again be made optional. All member dues must be paid by the members, not by the employers. And employees must be afforded to seek outside legal counsel as a fundamental, constitutional right. Furthermore, there should be no possibility for transfers from government to unions as this constitutes a massive conflict of interest.