Thursday March 29, 2007
For Immediate Release
Ottawa, ON – IAMAW General Vice President Dave Ritchie urged Prime Minister Stephen Harper to immediately implement a ‘Buy Canadian’ procurement policy. “If the government would tie such a policy to all and any federally-funded municipal or provincial infrastructure investments, it would have an immediate impact on our manufacturing sector,” said Ritchie.
He made the suggestion during a meeting yesterday in Ottawa with Mr Harper and the Ministers of Labour, Finance and Industry. Ritchie was a member of a delegation of union leaders representing workers from the country’s slumping manufacturing and resource processing sector. The delegation led by Canadian Labour Congress president Ken Georgetti went to the meeting looking for signs of a plan to address the loss of nearly 250,000 manufacturing jobs in Canada.
“Right now there is no plan in place and our manufacturing sector needs a boost immediately,” said Ritchie. “The Prime Minister didn’t reject the idea; he said he would look into it, so it’s fair to say this won’t happen overnight.”
Ritchie also raised the issue of massive layoffs of heavy maintenance personnel by Air Canada and its plans to move more of those jobs to offshore low cost providers. “Fiscal policy has allowed a once great company to be systematically broken up and sold off in small pieces along with valuable highly skilled well-paying Canadian jobs,” Ritchie said.
“If the government allows this trend to continue, we’ll end up becoming sub-contractors to our own jobs.” Mr. Harper acknowledged the issue is on their radar but made no commitment to act on it.
