Building a better B.C. will take a cooperative effort
Vancouver Sun
November 29, 2010
By Jim Sinclair, president of the B.C. Federation of Labour

Today, one of the most important meetings in the province begins when more than 1,200 working people, from every corner of the province and every occupation, come together to shape a new vision for our province.

People who teach our children, run our forest industry, serve our food, take care of our sick, mine our resources, protect our environment, pick up our garbage and build our industries. In short, the people who get up every day and do just about everything that makes our province possible. For five days they will stop doing those jobs and turn their experience and wisdom to charting a course that will return hope to British Columbians.

It won't be easy. Working people and the labour movement face many challenges. We have witnessed a decade of decline in all things decent in our province. People are frustrated and discouraged. Child poverty is the highest in Canada. Care for seniors is failing. Our minimum wage is the lowest. Our students have the highest debt. We lead the nation in job losses. Those injured on the job have no pensions. Unemployment is unacceptably high. The list is long.

At the top of our agenda will be the creation of good jobs. We need policies that put British Columbia first and a government that will act on them. As we watched sawmill after sawmill, pulp mill after pulp mill close (50,000 good jobs lost) it became abundantly clear that Liberal forest policies failed miserably. Log exports hit record levels and nothing was done. Delegates know that forestry will only remain a foundation of our economy if we bring in policies that require proper reforestation and value-added industry.

Delegates this week also will debate how the labour movement can work with environmentalists to build a skilled, sustainable economy that produces good, union jobs. Labour and environmental groups have worked together in the past. Now more than ever, we must combine our resources, skills and energies to confront climate change.

Gordon Campbell was recently declared "Builder of the Decade" by one of his corporate backers. How then do we explain the shortage of 160,000 skilled workers Campbell's own government predicts the province will face in five years? The Liberals built bridges, buildings and roads but they failed the most basic challenge -to build a new generation of builders.

How else do you explain the number of graduating apprentices actually dropped during the largest building boom in our history? Instead of investing, the government cut funds and fired apprenticeship counsellors.

Too many employers have ignored their obligation to train workers and the Liberals made it worse.

The answer lies not in poaching skilled workers from under-developed countries, but in investing in British Columbians so we can perform the skills in our province.

The men and women who make up the labour movement take seriously their responsibility to work on behalf of all workers, not just those who have a union card. That is why the Federation continues to campaign to end the Liberal's nine-year minimum wage freeze. Former Liberal ministers and even the Chamber of Commerce are now agreeing with the Federation and the vast majority of British Columbians who believe the $6 an hour "training wage" should be eliminated and the minimum wage raised to $10 an hour.

The labour movement is under no illusion that $10 an hour will end poverty, but it does get us one step closer to a province where no full-time worker finds themselves with a paycheque that leaves them below the poverty line. Delegates this week will no doubt discuss what we need to do next, so that everyone in our province earns a living wage and we can reverse B.C.'s shameful levels of poverty.

It is not enough to simply imagine what a better province would look like. We also need to explain how we pay for the services we want and need. No matter how you measure it, the Liberal's reckless tax cuts of the last decade have failed to deliver the promised results and have left us collectively poorer not richer.

The HST is the wrong tax, at the wrong time to be paid by the wrong people. The provincewide revolt against this dishonest tax must not be allowed to turn into a reckless tax-cutting campaign.

Delegates this week will continue a discussion that needs to spread beyond our convention hall and across our province: how to introduce tax fairness to build a province that makes us all collectively richer. That discussion is long overdue….

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