PRESIDENT

In regards to the merger I still have not been contacted by CEUDA however, I have been advised verbally that their committee has met and prepared a document that was to be discussed by their National Board before being submitted to us for comment.

I had a meeting with the PSAC National President and the President of CEUDA and discussed the anomalies in the 2 to 1 allocation of members. We were then requested to make submissions to her for review. (See attachment 3) I have held off sending a memo to the locals on this issue until I see what the PSAC National President does with the submissions.

It was a long time coming but the team and at the 11^th hour the politicians joined forces and a tentative agreement was finally reached at 3:41 AM on January 26, 2002 . My compliments go to the team for their work under strained conditions since November 2000 and the members for their solid support for the team throughout the process. Both of these things were instrumental in arriving at the agreement. The reports by the membership, both by e-mail and first hand at Annual General Meetings, have on a huge scale been positive. There has been history making improvements for “term employees”, as well as, the GS and GL groups. This agreement contains something for everyone and the team should be exceptionally proud of their results. We will know on the afternoon of March 22, 2002 what the membership thinks of this agreement. I will e-mail the Council, Alternates and Locals of the Ratification results on the 22^nd.

As you are aware, the employer did have the intention of rolling out the National Union Leave policy. I had another meeting with the employer where they agreed to look at making further changes but still intended to roll it out in all probability April 1, 2002 . I advised the employer that the UTE-SEI would do everything in our power to fight this initiative. Immediately after my meeting with Dan Tucker and Jacques Cloutier I went over to see the negotiating team to brief them on the employer’s position in regards to the policy. That afternoon the team brought the policy to the negotiating table. The result was an MOU as part of the tentative agreement that the policy would not be rolled out at this time. I would like all local, regional and national representatives to advise the National Office immediately if their current union leave changes in any way. A bulletin has been issued requesting such a report to the National Office.

Much to my surprise and shock there are still some locals that have not activated and used their e-mail addresses that we gave them in September. I was under the belief that it was of paramount importance that we secure non-CCRA addresses for the locals in order for us to communicate freely with them. This is also after Council was requested to remind their locals to activate the addresses. If we are to save some trees and use the electronic system solely instead of paper all locals must activate their accounts. The National Office will not be using personal addresses except for the Alternate RVP’s and Committee members. It escapes me why the locals have not made use of the e-mail addresses that we have provided. I will be addressing this with the locals at the President’s Conference.

Jacques Cloutier and I met again in January and reviewed the outstanding grievance lists. Many of the old ones have now been completed and we are both striving for short time frames for completion in both presenting and replying. We will continue to monitor the situation and meet on an as need basis.

As approved at the December Council, we purchased the new servers and workstations for the office. Not only did we upgrade our hardware to state of the art equipment, we also replaced our varied operating systems (win95, win98, and win me) with an industry recommended business operating system, win2000. We also upgraded our office suite of applications from Microsoft Office 97 to Microsoft Office XP. With the odd exception, the transition was almost seamless. The servers, the cabling, the hub/switch, and the UPS were all installed and tested, without any major problems. The only remaining work to be done is to completely transfer the live data from the email server to the new server. This will be done during off hours. The inventory was kept up to date during this transition period and new inventory tags were put on our new equipment. We are still running Symantec’s anti-virus software, running parallel with our Groupwise filtering software. Numerous viruses are trapped on a daily basis.

Other than Local 20002, Northern B.C. and the Yukon , who indicated it was attempting to formulate a list, the National Office has not received any new input from Locals since the December Council.

UNION RECRUITMENT/RETENTION TRAINING COURSE AND PRESIDENT’S CONFERENCE MODULE:

Shane will be making a presentation using a module during the President’s Conference on this topic. He will be working on the completion of the course over the next coming months.

At its second Strategy Session since the 2000 PSAC Convention, members of the National Board of Directors undertook an honest assessment of what our union has accomplished over the past twenty months, what our challenges are, where we want to go as a union, and some concrete steps we need to take to get there. One key question guided our discussions: how can we best serve the interests of the members that we are privileged to represent?

The PSAC vision statement we developed is simple: Through collective action, further the interests of all PSAC members and working people in general. This vision recognizes the union’s responsibility to fight to improve the workplace rights and working conditions of our members, and acknowledges our role in fighting to improve the society in which our members live.

We can all be proud of our achievements over the past twenty months. Our financial situation has improved, due in large part to strong financial management on our part coupled with a solid membership base. We have conducted several successful strikes and obtained the best possible collective agreements for our members in a number of bargaining units. Together with other unions, we have engaged in a number of economic, social and political justice issues that have a direct impact on the jobs and working lives of our members. We have more membership involvement in our union than ever before.

Our union has a diverse membership, and our structure provides our members with the opportunity to participate in their union in numerous ways : through their Locals/Branches, their Components, their Regions, and a myriad of Area Councils, and issue-based Committees. We view our structure as a strength, because it provides all members with the opportunity to participate. We strongly believe that within the PSAC, there is a place for Components, Regions, and the national PSAC structure. But as members of the NBoD, we also discussed the challenges that come with our structure, and struck a Committee of the NBoD to review the roles, responsibilities and jurisdictions of Components, Regions, and the PSAC national level, and make recommendations as to which part of our structure is in a best position to deliver specific services to the PSAC membership.

Collectively, we re-affirmed our commitment to union education and training, as well as to Local Development. We see these as key tools to building and maintaining strong and vibrant Locals/Branches and to encouraging and facilitating membership participation in our union and its structures.

During this Strategy Session, we identified further challenges that we need to work on together, including how to best meet the workplace needs of our members, how to improve the way we bargain, how to engage more members in the bargaining process, and how we can identify and work together on common issues as they emerge.

Members of the NBoD understand the magnitude of these and the many other challenges we face. But the substance of the discussions we had at this Strategy Session, and the openness and honesty with which we were able to identify and address our issues, have renewed our collective commitment to building and renewing our union.

I have to say that at this meeting the majority of the NBOD spoke very openly and honestly for the first time that I can recall. The discussion was needed and long overdue. I will elaborate verbally during the discussion of my report.

We will be conducting another workshop during this President’s Conference. I would like the Council to facilitate these workshops as they did in September. The document to be used will be distributed to Council beforehand.

There are several resolutions on the agenda regarding some administration points for the Convention. The standard 10 “Convention Comments” releases have also started, as well as, the overall schedule of events has been published in a Bulletin. The Convention page on the UTE-SEI website has also been updated with further link sites provided by the Host Committee. Mike, Pierrette and myself are going to London on the 19^th of March to meet with the Host Committee and hotel to finalize some of the details. The bibs for the Host Committee have been ordered and I have asked for input from the Council regarding a “Convention Slogan”. Things appear to be shaping up nicely.

Two locals have questioned their “delegation” compliment and after examination both the St John ’s TSO and Shawinigan TC will be getting another delegate. We will reissue the delegate numbers by local and region to the field. The extra delegate to the Convention Committees from the Rocky Mountains Region will come from Edmonton .

Once the names of the delegates come in I will remind anyone who has declared that they are running for office that they may request address labels of the delegates from the National Office. The past practice has been two sets of labels, if requested.

The changes that were made in December 2001 to the Regulation governing Non UTE Events plus the number of requests received for the upcoming PSAC-AFPC National Safety and Health Conference have caused some major concerns. Never in the last 2 if not 3 years have we spent the budgeted line item of $10,000 dollars. That was mainly due to the fact that the scheduled PSAC-AFPC Conferences that were scheduled for 2001 were postponed to the year 2002, as well as, only one item was eligible for reimbursement. I would like to outline some of the concerns that have surfaced with the first requests for reimbursement under this Regulation.

First, the people requesting the funding, did so prior to being accepted to attend the conference. This was done due to the fact that they would not be able to attend without the assistance of the regulation and the deadline for registration was fast approaching. It was a “catch 22”. They wanted to register but needed the funding to attend.

I received many requests that were originally authorized but then later had to report to the members that made the requests that it would hinge upon being accepted by the PSAC-AFPC. Once the registration closed the PSAC-AFPC gave us a list of registrants for our component which totaled 44. However, we had not at that point received 44 requests for funding.

The PSAC-AFPC then advised us that they had approximately 300 seats with 500 applicants. The UTE-SEI was allocated only 16 seats with 44 applicants. To be fair we decided that we would look at the allocation regionally in order for every region to at least have someone attend the conference. The RVP’s were contacted and with their help we were able to select 16 members to attend. We have never been put into this position before using this regulation.

Secondly, the members who requested funding were only giving estimates of the cost of what they were requesting to be reimbursed since some of the actual costs were not known at the time prior to being accepted. It was only after they knew that they were accepted could actual costs, mostly travel, be calculated. As well, some members were not timely in provided the costs to the National Office. Thus, it was difficult for me to determine how close we were to the $10,000 limit. Yet, UTE-SEI had to tell them whether or not they would be reimbursed under the Regulation. Again, another “catch 22”.

It became very clear that this conference would use the entire amount of the budgeted line item that was supposed to cover the entire year. The PSAC-AFPC has several more conferences scheduled for this year because of their postponement from last year and UTE-SEI is left with no further funds to be used for non UTE events. That in itself does not create a problem since when the money is gone, it is gone.

However, I would request that the Council think about “rescinding” the change that was made in December in regards to the reimbursement for two items instead of one. I don’t think that the Council’s intention was to use up all of the money with the first event in the year. UTE-SEI has always prided itself in assisting their members in attending the PSAC-AFPC Conferences when they are not fully funded by the Alliance . This would not help for this year but it would for following years. One of the other things that may have prompted such a large number of members requesting funding is that the UTE-SEI does not have Safety and Health Conferences but the PSAC-AFPC does. We may also have to consider the requests on a first come first serve basis or some other basis like by region. Since we have never run into this before I would like some discussion by the Council on the following:

· How the reimbursement should take place; first come first serve, regionally or some other basis. This may entail a change to the Regulation with direction on how the President deals with the requests;

· A change to the Regulation that the member requesting must submit the actual costs that they want reimbursed;

I feel that it is imperative for the Council to supply direction on this Regulation.

20 - Meeting with Claude Tremblay and Jacques Cloutier regarding the John King decision “definition of a day”

January 3 - Delivering “New member kits” withChris Aylward to the OMs, PRs and ELs in Ottawa

21 - Meeting with Tucker and Cloutier regarding Union Leave and then met with the team and briefed them on the employer’s position on the Union Leave policy

25 - Met with Tucker, Jolicoeur and Tremblay three times and with the team twice