Cathryn Hoy, RN
President

President’s Message

As we approach ONA’s 50th birthday, your Board of Directors, ONA management and staff have been working tirelessly  to reimagine and reenergize our union, ensuring it remains effective and dynamic for the next 50 years.  This is a new era. While the challenges have never been as great, our commitment and will have never been stronger.

We have made a concerted effort to step up our public and media messaging. We are truly telling Ontarians the truth about health care and those who provide that care.

Front-line members are mobilizing like never before and making a difference. ONA has always said that our strength lies in solidarity, and we all need to use our voices and speak up and out. You are doing so, and it’s working.

ONA is rolling out a Strategic Plan to ensure that the services you receive from ONA improve and, with your feedback, continue to do so.

One initiative from this past year is the release of ONA’s Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Plan. Our goal is to educate, increase awareness and ensure everyone is treated with dignity and respect. You’ll read about many more ONA initiatives and key work over the past year on the following pages.

I am so appreciative of you all as well as those I have been working alongside at ONA. We are a formidable team, getting better every day, and I look forward to building a bright future.

Andrea Kay, RN
Chief Executive Officer

CEO’s Message

The old proverb about living in “interesting times” has never been truer.

ONA and our 68,000 nurses and health-care professionals, as well as 18,000 nursing student affiliates, certainly are living in such times. We have been put to the test to a degree we’ve never before seen and are emerging more committed and stronger than ever.

This Annual Report details for you the myriad of change ONA is undergoing to serve members the best ways we can. President Cathryn Hoy has written about much of the change, and as CEO, I would be remiss in not praising our management team and staff for their efforts.

We have all had to show a great deal of resolve, resilience and flexibility recently, both in our personal and professional lives. Your ONA staff has done this brilliantly. We demand a lot from them and they have come through for you, our members.

Just as we have all had to evolve and adapt throughout the pandemic, so too has our staff structure at ONA. Our reporting structure is being refined and realigned, we continue to add staff to ensure your needs are met in a timely way, and even our information technology system is being brought up to date. It’s a lot to adjust to, but we all committed to adopting best practices for your benefit.

I want to thank not only our Board, management and staff, but you — each and every ONA member — for your dedication, loyalty and resilience. We will continue to live in “interesting” times and will need the strength we have together.

Our Strategic Plan

Just having a plan is not enough; we must follow through on it.

With this in mind, the ONA team has been hard at work determining how our very first Strategic Plan will be put into practice. The plan, ratified at our 2021 Biennial Convention, took into consideration input from more than 3,000 members and staff, setting out six overarching priorities and 22 strategic actions to take place through 2026.

Since then, the implementation work has centered on three key outputs:

1. Board Direction Statement.
2. Accountability Framework.
3. Multi-Year Action Plans.

Board Direction Statement

In January, the ONA Board of Directors identified nine actions from the longer list of strategic actions
to be regarded as urgent and prioritized in the near term, or years 1-2 of the plan. They outlined rationale
for their selections to provide clear guidance to staff. These priorities were top-of-mind in all planning work undertaken in the following months, with the expectation of progress by the end of 2022. The Board selections included actions 2, 6, 8, 12, 13, 16, 18, 20 and 21.

“The Board is committed to implementing the kind of ONA members want for today, tomorrow and generations to come. This plan will only make us stronger and better connected.”
— ONA President Cathryn Hoy, RN

Board and staff members provide an update on the Strategic Plan at the June Provincial Coordinators Meeting.

Accountability Framework

Are we successfully doing what we said we were going to do and achieve?

This simple question is at the heart of the Accountability Framework, developed by a working group of the Board’s Quality Committee, with representation from staff, membership and the Board. The framework contains indicators and measures of success that are linked to the plan’s priorities and the mission, vision and values.

Tracking and reporting will help make ONA’s progress transparent and clear to members and others in ONA. This will provide important insights into what works and what doesn’t to better create the conditions for success.

Multi-Year Action Plans

While that work was ongoing, a group of staff co-leads were developing Multi-Year Action Plans (MYAPs). These MYAPs answer the question of “What is ONA going to DO to support each of the 22 actions in the Strategic Plan?”

Everyone involved wanted these plans to strike a balance between being ambitious and realistic. The full action plans are detailed operational documents that lay out for each year what tasks will be done, the resources needed, the risks and barriers involved, and the indicators and measures that will help us track progress.

Staff wholeheartedly believe that having these plans in place will strengthen their focus and make ONA more effective in facing challenges over the next four years.

Both the MYAPs and Accountability Framework were presented for feedback to the full Board of Directors in June 2022. The Board looked at whether the plans meet the expectations of members and if what we have set out is achievable.

Moving forward, ONA staff and representatives will be taking the next important steps in bringing the plan to life — reporting on our progress every step of the way.

COVID-19 Pandemic

While the COVID-19 pandemic persisted, leaving a trail of exhausted nurses and health-care professionals in its wake, and despite warnings from ONA, the province looked for a full return to normal over the past year.

Ontario Reopens

In October 2021, the Ford government announced a timeline roadmap plan to lift restrictions. While there was some backtracking in the subsequent months with the emergence of the more virulent omicron variant, on January 31, 2022, with key public health and health indicators starting to show slight signs of improvement, the government began a phased approached to lifting all restrictions.

Also lifted were the previously extended redeployment orders established in Bill 195, Reopening Ontario Act, meaning employers could no longer redeploy, reassign, change the schedule of work or shift assignments, defer
or cancel vacation, absences or other leaves, or employ extra staff without complying with the provisions of collective agreements and relevant statutes. ONA had been sounding the alarm on the extraordinary powers and overreach the Ford government awarded themselves with that bill since 2020.

When they introduced a “plan” on August 18, 2022 to manage the virus long-term, including conducting thousands of surgeries in private hospitals, we immediately spoke out. The Ford government completely ignored the concerns of the very nurses and health-care professionals who faced so many challenges and sacrificed so much to keep the health-care system afloat throughout the pandemic, including Bill 124 and the staffing crisis.

We were equally concerned by the subsequent announcement from the province’s Chief Medical Officer of Health that infected patients must no longer isolate for five days and can resume activities after just 24 hours regardless of a positive COVID-19 test result. We told the media we had barely emerged from the seventh wave and that the science indicates we need stronger protections. ONA and our fellow unions also continued to demand 10 permanent paid sick days for all workers and full and permanent immigration status for all migrants.

Joint Activism

And so, our advocacy continues. The pandemic also put a sharp focus on our members’ role as patient advocate, as you mobilized and pressed your MPPs and employers on issues such as personal protective equipment and other safeguards.

After decades of pushing for change through countless inquiries, commissions and hearings, ONA remains optimistic that the type of tragedy we have seen during the pandemic, particularly in long-term care, will never be allowed to happen again, thanks to this joint activism.

Provincial Election

ONA and our members kept the focus squarely where it needed to be during the June 2022 provincial election: on health care.

With so much at stake, including regressive legislation, such as Bill 124, a growing nursing shortage, increased workplace burnout and violence, and a woefully underfunded health-care system threatened by privatization, ONA launched our most ambitious and comprehensive election campaign to date, Nurses Vote. The goal was to educate members, politicians and the public on ONA’s key priorities — repeal Bill 124, end the nurse staffing crisis, improve working conditions, ensure fairness through a social determinants of health lens, and keep health care public — and to encourage them to vote for health care. And we certainly did!

Member Advocacy

A key component of the campaign was the appointment of 20 dedicated members, referred to as secondees, from all five regions, who worked with their Regional Vice-Presidents and ONA staff on targeted engagement work in their regions, involving thousands of other members.

This included spearheading and participating in rallies wearing hard-to-miss bright pink shirts outside of MPPs’ constituency offices, workplaces, Queen’s Park and other prominent locations to demand better. On May 1 alone, members participated in 15 rallies throughout the province in support of the Ontario Federation of Labour’s Day of Action, demanding the repeal of Bill 124. The Toronto rally was one of our highest attended ever!

While many candidates marched with us, we also went directly to them, with our secondees and members conducting 40 candidate meetings with all major party leaders and speaking at several of their media events. We even crashed a few of Premier Doug Ford’s!

Ensuring members were contacted directly about what was at stake during this election was crucial, with secondees and member volunteers calling almost 41,000 members and sending more than 15,000 texts. Many also spoke to their colleagues face-to-face outside of work hours, and social media was widely used.

“This is not just about being an activist; it’sabout being a leader in your community, your workplaces — wherever you want to see change. ONA members are the union, and we need to stand together.”
— Region 2 secondee Cheshta Sharma, RN

Provincial Support

To complement this work, ONA created a visually stunning and information-packed Nurses Vote website. We sent email blasts to our members and a broadcast voicemail message from ONA President Cathryn Hoy. We launched a powerful Nurses Fighting for Change advertising campaign, featuring our own members. We included an informative election brochure with Front Lines. We spoke at many press conferences. And we were all over the media, appearing in more than 160 election-related stories and blog posts.

While the Ford government remained in power, there is no question our campaign made an impact. ONA was active in eight of the 10 ridings decided by fewer than 1,000 votes, and the Conservatives received the support of just 40 per cent of voters (and only 17 per cent of all eligible voters due to low voter turnout). That means 60 per cent voted against them. Three other major parties committed to repealing Bill 124 and shifted their campaign messaging to focus on health care — and more than 53 per cent of Ontarians voted for those parties.

We also came away with much hope. Members bonded like never before to build the kind of province you want to see, and we will continue to harness that power. The Board is committed to increasing our mobilizing work, and so too are our secondees, who relayed that the campaign was a tremendous learning experience that has sparked a desire to become even more politically active.

Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Action Plan

Acknowledging that we have much work to do, ONA released a groundbreaking action plan to address the ongoing racism and oppression that exist for so many.

Our 2022-2026 Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression (ARAO) Action Plan comes on the heels of ONA’s powerful position statement, Beyond Good Intentions: Confronting Racial Discrimination through Solidary, released a month after the tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minnesota police officer, sparking a long overdue global wake-up call. The statement called for the formation of a consulting group of members to strengthen policies and approaches to anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, noting, “We will listen to those with lived experiences. We will educate ourselves. We will not be silent.”

ARAO Approach

Soon after, an Anti-Racism Advisory (ARA) Team, consisting of up to three Black ONA members, up to three Indigenous members and up to three members from racialized groups was formed, supported by our new staff ARAO Working Group. The ARAO Working Group is assisted by Lead Consultant Tomee Sojourner-Campbell. Region 1 Vice-President Dawn Armstrong, who holds the portfolio of human rights and equity, chairs the ARA Team.

By reviewing material already available, examining issues from those with direct lived experiences of racism and intersectional forms of racism within our communities and workplaces, and what is happening within the broader health-care sector to address issues around racism, the working group, in full consultation with the ARA Team, created the action plan, a summary of which was released in August 2022 in both official languages.

“We recognize that the intersections of racism, gender, age, socio-economic status, housing, geographic location and other social determinants of health leave Black, Indigenous, racialized and historically marginalized communities at increased risk of marginalization and diminished health outcomes within Ontario’s health-care system,” the action plan states. “ONA has traditionally used a human rights and equity approach to guide our work and underpin our belief that every member and employee has the right to equal treatment and freedom from discrimination and harassment in the workplace and the union. While this approach continues to be a core tenet of our work, we recognize that we need to use an ARAO approach to identify and address intersectional forms of racism and advance equity.”

An ARAO approach focuses on the different ways people from Black, Indigenous, racialized and historically marginalized groups experience racism. Integrating this approach into ONA’s work will help us review our organizational structures, policies, procedures, practices and actions, and develop remedies and preventative measures.

Where do We Go from Here?

The action plan contains seven priority areas (see box) and 34 action items that will guide us as we build our infrastructure, challenge systemic racism and strengthen internal capacity to integrate evidence-based ARAO practices into every level of ONA’s services, work environments, workplace culture and leadership. This is not a static plan; rather, it will change over time based on known and unknown factors.

It will take the support of all ONA members to move this critical work forward, with the action plan stating that “without individual and collective action, racism in all its different forms will continue to threaten the health and safety of so many in our profession, work environments and the communities we call home.”

The ARAO Action Plan’s Seven Priorities

1. Reconciliation
2. ARAO Education
3. Supporting Indigenous, Black, Racialized & Historically Marginalized Members, Staff, Management and Elected Leadership
4. General Supports, Resources and Tools
5. Organizational Development and Operations
6. Representation Matters! Leadership
7. Leading Change-2022 and Beyond

Key events and highlights from October 1, 2021 to September 30, 2022.

Organizational Changes at ONA

While ONA has always provided excellent services to our dedicated members, we have had to meet and surpass your needs and expectations in an ever-changing and challenging work environment.

That means reviewing and assessing our staffing needs regularly and looking for ways to ensure we have the workforce and resources available to provide that increased level of support.

With that in mind, many changes to our organizational structure were undertaken this past year that will make certain ONA is the strongest and most effective union it can be, and that we establish a framework for our future sustainability and growth. These changes firmly align with our five-year Strategic Plan.

One thing that hasn’t changed though is the dedication of our Board of Directors, Local and Bargaining Unit leaders, front-line members and staff, who continue to work together to effect positive change and enhance our union.