The challenges that we have all faced on the front lines of health care often seem insurmountable. But ONA has demonstrated our deep commitment to supporting members through actions, advocacy and perseverance at COVID-19 scientific and government tables.

Our achievements reflect ONA’s core function of championing high-quality health care for patients, residents and clients. Since our last Biennial, and despite the global pandemic, ONA has made significant inroads.

Early in 2020, ONA put our full attention on infection prevention, containment and ensuring members were protected from COVID-19. During a marathon session, we negotiated an agreement with the provincial government for new measures on personal protective equipment, including N95s. ONA spoke out at government tables to protect the health and safety of nurses and health-care professionals. This significant win would not have been possible without thousands of front-line members speaking out and telling us your real work-life stories.

As respected professionals, nurses and health-care professionals have the power to influence health-care change for patients, residents and clients. ONA engages members through town halls, digital storytelling, provincial campaigns, virtual rallies, phone and email zaps and other digital events.

Together, we are a strong, professional labour union that challenges the status quo. Many members, working with support from ONA, are now engaged in rallying, lobbying government and informing Ontarians. This is true member activism spreading across our province.

It is important to look to the future and envision opportunities. ONA’s strategic planning initiative was a major undertaking, beginning in 2020 with member engagement initiatives, including surveys, focus groups and tailored discussions. Throughout the process, members spoke passionately about how you see ONA as a supportive and active union in the years to come. This plan will help shape and set our priorities and our work for members, and will be strategically rolled out over the coming months.

Cathryn Hoy, RN
First Vice-President
Portfolio: Local Political Action and Professional Issues

DJ Sanderson, RN
Region 3 Vice-President
Portfolio: Labour Relations

At our last Biennial Convention in 2019, could any of us imagine how our lives were about to be thrust upside down? It’s hard to even begin to describe the demands placed on all of us — most especially our incredible front-line RNs and health-care professionals.

While you were already facing unprecedented challenges related to a provincial government that questioned the value of public health and community care, valued dollars and restrained spending above quality health care, and targeted — again — our female-dominated professionals in regressive policies, the COVID-19 pandemic managed to put even those challenges in perspective.

Despite this, I believe that ONA — your union — has risen to the challenge of continuing to provide the best service to our members of any health-care union in Canada.

Every ONA staff person — from our Labour Relations Officers (LROs), legal staff to our service team members — has demonstrated their dedication and flexibility to ensure you still have access to representation and services when you need it. They have all come together, many “behind the scenes,” as part of the greater Team ONA.

Despite public health guidance that shut down our offices, we quickly found new ways to work. In a pandemic that meant no face-to-face meetings, we adopted technology to continue to provide uninterrupted service to you.

That technology includes the way we are meeting for our 2021 Biennial Convention. It also means that ONA has been able to come up with creative solutions to handle labour relations (negotiating via Zoom), legal matters (arbitrations and court hearings via Zoom), finance challenges (dual dues refunds), and, well, almost every aspect of our work to serve you.

I want to thank our staff, the Board of Directors, and most of all you. While the Ford government continues to do its best to undervalue and disrespect our professions, please rest assured that ONA is doing everything in our power to reverse the outrageous actions and policies they have put in place.

Campaigns: To get our message out on key issues, ONA embarked on advertising campaigns every month throughout 2020-21, utilizing TV, radio, print and social media ads. This included our month-long Ontario-wide “Holding the Line” campaign, featuring members’ resilience during the pandemic; and our “Keep Nursing Strong” campaign on the impact of COVID-19. View ads at https://nursesknow.ona.org and https://www.keepnursingstrong.ca.

Media: Public health and RN cuts, the pandemic, pay equity and two long-term care (LTC) commission reports were just part of ONA’s media focus. From January 2020 to August 2021, ONA held several news conferences, issued 128 media releases, completed 816 media interviews, and wrote 20 letters to the editor and 11 opinion editorials. We also met with the Toronto Star’s editorial board to provide information on LTC and worked with that paper on a front-page exclusive on pandemic outbreaks in LTC homes.

With our continued pressure yielding results, ONA forced the Ford government to include social workers as care coordinators in the next transition to the newly restructured Ontario Health Teams that will include home and community care. In the initial proposal, only regulated health professionals under the Regulated Health Professions Act would be able to practice as care coordinators.

ONA also supported the movement for paid sick days in Ontario. Relentless public pressure forced the government to introduce a temporary COVID-19 paid sick leave program for workers, but the struggle continues for permanent paid sick leave.

Fighting for fairness was also a common theme of ONA’s work with our nursing student affiliates. Nursing students were part of a legal challenge of the Ford government’s “Student Choice Initiative,” supported by ONA, which mandated universities/colleges to allow students to opt out of some ancillary fees, devastating student organizing. In November 2019, Ontario’s Divisional Court struck down the policy, and in August 2021, the government’s appeal was dismissed. With ONA’s assistance, nursing students also called on the government to fix their clinical placements, which were cancelled due to the pandemic. In May 2021, the government announced funding to expand clinical education placements and introduced a clinical extern program.

Reiterating the shortcomings in LTC we have brought to government tables since long before the pandemic hit, adding powerful new statistics and information, highlighting the heartbreaking personal accounts of our brave LTC members, gleaned from hundreds of interviews and surveys ONA staff conducted, and compiling meaningful recommendations to ensure a tragedy like this never happens again, ONA prepared three reports for the Commission: COVID-19 in Long-Term Care: ONA Survey Results; ONA’s Final Submissions and Recommendations; and Are We in This Together? The Voices of Ontario’s Long-Term Care Nurses.

We also commissioned a fourth report, Fatal Choices: COVID-19, Nursing and the Tragedy of Long-Term Care, authored by Mario Possamai, former senior advisor to the Ontario SARS Commission, which thoughtfully analyzes the circumstances and decisions made in LTC that led to its current state.

It was a mammoth task, taking place over many months, but our members’ horrific tales about a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), employers refusing to cohort residents, severe staff shortages and so much illness and death — to name but a few — were clearly heard. After two interim reports, the Commission released its final 322-page report on April 30, 2021, containing 85 recommendations that address the long-standing neglect of LTC (see box). The report anonymously quotes many ONA members, and its recommendations echo many of ours.

The report recommends that LTC homes adopt a person-centred model of
care, which focuses on treatment and resources based on residents’ needs,
and that the role of for-profit operators be reduced to accessing capital and
building new homes, not running them. It also emphasizes the importance
of the precautionary principle and called for immediate changes to increase
staffing and align wages and benefits with those in public hospitals. They
further called for increased government funding, an effective inspection
regime, and strengthened whistleblower protection, along with a number of
recommendations on pandemic planning and the maintenance of a PPE stockpile.

The Commission made it clear that the time for action is now. There will
be future pandemics and Ontario must be ready. ONA will relentlessly push
to ensure these recommendations are implemented so the tragic deaths of so
many were not in vain.

It also meant that our normal representation to members was done virtually, as labour arbitration and adjudication moved online. Our caseload didn’t let up, but we continued to provide a high level of service. Here are some highlights.

Injunction

In April 2020, faced with Ministry of Labour, Training and Skills Development (MLTSD) inspectors unwilling to issue orders, no help from local Medical Officers of Health, and knowing that expedited arbitration was too slow to get the urgent health and safety issues of members addressed, ONA took the extraordinary step of filing a motion for an injunction in the Ontario Superior Court, seeking immediate compliance with the government’s Directives #3 and #5.

The motion was heard by Justice Morgan on April 22 and granted the following day. His decision, which relied heavily on the precautionary principle and quoted Justice Campbell from the SARS Commission Report, states:

Long-Term Care: Stout Award

Following the injunction, ONA negotiated an expedited hearing date for an arbitration involving all participating homes. Arbitrator John Stout met with the parties on May 4, 2020, resulting in an award that ordered homes to implement a wide range of infection control and health and safety measures, including engineering, administrative and personal protective equipment controls, such as access to N95 respirators based on the nurse’s point of care risk assessment (PCRA).

Occupational Health and Safety (OHSA) Appeals

We filed an unprecedented number of OHSA appeals in the past two years: 23 in 2020, with 10 in the first two months of the pandemic alone. The appeals covered many sectors: 18 hospital, one Local Health Integration Network (LHIN), two long-term care and two home care.

ONA secured settlements in most of these appeals, including where employers agreed to respect the PCRA, and with the MLTSD, which agreed their inspectors would be directed to interpret Directive #5 consistent with the integration of Justice Morgan in our injunction (see previous column). Other cases proceeded to hearing, and litigation is ongoing.

In March, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that a 2016 Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal decision regarding pay equity maintenance for women working in participating nursing homes is unreasonable. It held that the fundamental purpose of the Pay Equity Act is to redress systemic discrimination in compensation, and to do so, there must be an ongoing comparison between male and female job classes.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted the dedicated nurses and health-care workers in these homes, the majority of whom are female, and the Ford government has praised them publicly, it hasn’t backed that up with the respect that equal pay — a fundamental human right protected by the Act, as well as numerous international human rights laws that Canada has ratified — would provide.

The long legal challenge pitted ONA and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare against the participating nursing homes and government. At issue was how, under the Act, a female-dominated workforce should determine their pay is equitable with men when they have few male coworkers.

In such situations, the Act provides a proxy method, allowing a female-dominated workplace to be compared with a female job class from a similar workplace that has already been compared with a male job class and achieved pay equity. ONA and SEIU argued the proxy method must be continually repeated to maintain pay equity, while the participating nursing homes and government believed it should only be used to establish it.

Probationary Nurse Reinstated

A probationary nurse was unable to attend orientation within the designated timeframe scheduled by the employer and terminated. Although probationary terminations are sometimes challenging to overturn, ONA filed a grievance on behalf of this nurse and argued in favour of reinstatement. Because this nurse had previously worked as an RPN on the same unit before transferring into the RN role, we argued that a full orientation was not required, making the employer’s decision to terminate on those grounds unreasonable.

ONA asserted that there were several factors beyond the nurse’s control that led to an inability to attend the orientation in the timeframe specified, including a COVID-19 outbreak, which required the nurse to self-isolate as per Ministry of Health and public health directives. We emphasized that our member was not intentionally truant and the decision to terminate was an unreasonable enforcement of management powers relating to probationary nurse releases in the collective agreement, and should be overturned. The employer accepted ONA’s arguments and facts, and agreed to reinstate the member.

Retroactive/LTD Payments Achieved

A member had depression that was intensified by their work environment, and resulted in workplace attendance issues. They received counselling and specialized medical treatment. Their disability required times of rest, treatment and medication changes, and they were able to reintegrate back to work successfully. Unfortunately, the nurse’s illness became profound, and they could not recover and return to work. Combined with the member’s occupational health file and medical reports — and after filing a grievance and completing a long-term disability (LTD) appeal — ONA was successful in achieving retroactive payments dating back to December 2019, along with monthly LTD payments.

The Ford government’s Bill 124, which caps wage and benefit improvements at a maximum of one per cent per year for each of three years, removes the right to freely bargain in many sectors and, therefore, impacted recent negotiations (held via Zoom).

Despite that, ONA continued to negotiate based on membership priorities — and we achieved several wins in various sectors. Significantly, no central bargaining improvements were removed or rolled back.

Hospital Central Bargaining: The arbitration decision that affects 60,000 hospital members was released in September 2021. While RNs and health-care professionals received an insulting one per cent wage increase, ONA achieved improved language related to human rights and equity, and health and safety, foundational issues for which we have long advocated.

Not-for-Profit Nursing Homes Central Bargaining: ONA has 15 homes in this group, which received a one per cent increase in each of three years, along with very small increases to shift and weekend premiums, in an arbitrated contract affected by Bill 124. Improved language related to personal protective equipment and pandemic planning was negotiated.

Home Care Providers: Victorian Order of Nurses members’ new contract runs until 2023. With the precariousness of home care work, especially during COVID-19, ONA achieved a commitment from the employer regarding infectious disease management. The new contract provides much-needed clarity and consolidates some language to make it consistent across Bargaining Units, something that ONA has long demanded. A new letter of understanding regarding the employer’s commitment to equity, diversity and inclusivity is a key win for members.

Public Health: The Ford government had announced its intent to merge the province’s 34 existing public health units into 10 new entities, which was delayed due to COVID-19. Should the government proceed with restructuring, funding will likely be impacted. Over the past two years, several public health units received wage settlements in the range of two per cent with improved benefits.