Greetings Union sisters, brothers and siblings,

It was my honour to attend the 2022 Unifor Constitutional Convention to represent the members of our Union Local 4270.  A little background, we are allotted delegates based on our membership.  As it is currently under 500 members we are given 1 delegate and 1 alternate.  The alternate attends should the delegate for any reason be unable to attend the convention hall, for example important Local union business, illness, accident or other.  It has been the long standing policy of our Local that the President attend as delegate, and one of the workplace Unit Chairpersons attend as alternate.  The alternate delegate rotates amongst our 3 workplaces, Chateau Laurier Hotel, Russel Metals, and Sterling Ford.  As such Miles Bailey, Chateau Laurier Hotel Unit Chairperson attended as alternate delegate with myself as delegate.  The alternate delegate is not allowed to vote or speak to the convention.

Miles and myself upon meeting at the convention worked together to develop a convention action plan for our Local to ensure that our members voices are heard on the important issues to be discussed at convention.  We quickly determined that we needed an empirical method to rank the candidates for National President.  We agreed to rank the candidates on a point based system with the below issues to be scored:

Once we agreed to the issues to be ranked, we each independently reviewed each candidate.  Quite surprisingly when we compared our results they were exactly the same as to the overall ranking of the candidates.  Had we not been in agreement we had previously agreed we would respectfully debate our positions until we reached an agreement to vote for National President.  We also met with the candidates for National President and spoke with them about where they stood on the important issues for our members.

The alternate delegate is an extremely important role.  As voting delegate it can get very fast, with motions, debate, speakers, amendments, and yet Miles as alternate delegate kept track of all of that for us so that we could formulate where our Local stood on the issues at hand, and then Miles and I would quickly debate and come to a decision as to how our Local should vote.

It was a lot of work for both of us and I am proud that we both rose to the challenge.  Twice I rose to speak to the convention delegates on issues that we felt would negatively affect our Union, and our members.  Both times that led to those issues being resolved by the convention delegates.  I also arranged to meet with various National Union Directors to ensure our workplace concerns were heard and understood.  

We want to thank our members for entrusting us with the very important duties required of us as delegates and we want our members to know that your Unifor Local 4270 Executive Board is committed and driven by our responsibility to you, our members, to represent you and to work  work as hard as we can to address the issues that YOU, our members have in your workplaces.

In solidarity,

David O'Connor

Unifor Local 4270 President