By Carly Grossman and Rym Ghazal
The people at the top are still squabbling, but Ottawa’s rank-and-file firefighters have made their peace.
Dave Stephenson, president of the Ottawa Firefighter’s Association, says the union members who previously worked under the five collective agreements have ratified their first new contract.
“On Nov. 20 the city gets to ratify it, but the committee council already has,” says Stephenson. “So it seems to be a rubber stamp unless something happens. That is a very first step towards amalgamation.”
It has been nearly two years since the city’s fire services merged and Stephenson says the administration’s harmonization of the five departments is long overdue.
“They’ve all had their own collective agreements and that’s been part of the problem,” explains Stephenson. “With their own collective agreements they’ve all had different benefits and different hours of work.”
Sheelagh Taylor, director of labour relations for the City of Ottawa, agrees and says merging the five agreements was not an easy task.
“It’s been very difficult. There were five fire departments with their own terms and conditions of employment,” explains Taylor. “You still had that ‘I’m Ottawa, I’m Kanata’ silo mentality.
“So it’s not that you’re taking five existing documents and saying you’re going to renew it,” he says. “You are taking five existing documents and five existing cultures and trying to combine that into one workable document.”
Stephenson says it wasn’t easy for the members of the five different cultures to see themselves as part of one unit.
He also blames “posturing at the top” for slowing down the process of amalgamation.
“They (the deputy chiefs) all come from different cultures and they all have different ideas on how the department is run, so they ended up clashing all the time,” says Stephenson.
But he says he is optimistic the collective agreement will help resolve the administration’s differences.
“The union has been fighting that culture problem since day one—that’s all going to be gone now.”