Despite media coverage Thursday about a group of Alberta Sheriffs Branch officers who say they’d like to break away from the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees and form their own union, that could not happen without support from the United Conservative Party Government.
Which makes the announcement by the group calling itself the Sheriff Branch Officers Association, which said in the news release picked up by The Edmonton Journal that it hopes to “attain recognition as a union,” a potentially significant political story.
After all, the Sheriffs Branch has long been touted as the agency the United Conservative Party would like to use as the core of the “Alberta Rangers,” the provincial police force that nobody in Alberta seems to want except the party’s Take Back Alberta faction and the sovereignist political advisors who have the ear of Premier Danielle Smith.
So it’s possible there was more to this than a few officers disaffected with their union running a wild idea up the flagpole to see if anyone saluted when the association announced its launch on Thursday in a news release sent to media by Alberta Counsel, an Edmonton-based legal and lobbying firm co-founded by lawyer Shayne Saskiw, who was the Wildrose Party’s executive director and later the MLA for Lac La Biche-St. Paul-Two Hills during the time Ms. Smith led that party.
“We extend an invitation to the Alberta Government to collaborate with us in forming a union that genuinely represents and advocates for the needs of our officers,” said association president Dornubari Tornwe in the news release.
The release and the news coverage based on it, however, did not mention the most significant roadblock faced by the association’s supporters – the fact the Public Service Employee Relations Act states in section 10 that “the employees of the Crown in right of Alberta constitute a single bargaining unit.”
AUPE is deemed to be the bargaining agency for that single bargaining unit in section 74 of the act.
Aside from a list of management and other employees excluded from membership in any union, all direct employees of what most Albertans would think of as the provincial civil service are members of that single bargaining unit. This includes Alberta Sheriffs Branch officers, as well as Correctional officers, Probation officers and Fish and Wildlife officers also represented by AUPE.
Moreover, based on its past rulings, it’s extremely difficult to imagine the Alberta Labour Relations Board considering such an idea without a change in the legislation.
Given that, it’s hard to see how the Sheriffs’ group could form a breakaway union without a vote of the Legislature to amend the legislation – which would inevitably result in a vigorous public debate and have the additional potential to create unintended complications for the government in other public-sector bargaining.
Such a change would likely also be of concern to the National Police Federation, the sole certified bargaining agent for members and reservists of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police below the rank of inspector, and unions representing the Calgary and Edmonton police services, where Sheriffs Branch officers are already doing their members’ bargaining unit work for less pay on the streets of the province’s two largest cities.
But that’s why the association retained Alberta Counsel, Mr. Tornwe said Saturday, pointing to the Edmonton-based firm’s role in the creation of the Alberta Union of Nurse Practitioners, which happened after the UCP Government created a special small public-sector health care bargaining unit, membership in which was restricted to NPs.
“They do have a strategy,” said Mr. Tornwe, a former vice chair of the Sheriffs Officers’ section of the AUPE local that represents government employees who work law-enforcement related occupations. He was also a candidate for the Conservative Party of Canada nomination in the federal Edmonton Griesbach riding, now represented by NDP MP Blake Desjarlais, but dropped out of the contest a month ago.
Mr. Tornwe suggested the Sheriffs Officers’ association might try to persuade the government that its members should qualify under the same section of the act that excludes members of professional associations such as doctors, dentists, architects, engineers and lawyers employed directly by the government from membership in any union. How that would help a group with ambitions to be a union, however, is not clear.
Meanwhile, Mr. Tornwe said, his group can argue that a survey done for the association shows Alberta’s 1,400 Sheriffs Branch officers would overwhelmingly prefer their own union, and are unhappy that their pay significantly lags that of Edmonton and Calgary police officers, Mounties, and even Edmonton Transit peace officers.
He said about 200 officers signed up to join the association on its website, which was also posted online by Alberta Counsel, in the first two days after the group’s launch.
The scope of work done by Sheriffs Branch officers has grown dramatically over the years and is now comparable to the work done by members of other police forces, Mr. Tornwe argued.
AUPE has not yet provided a response, but it can be assumed the province’s largest union will vigorously oppose any effort to persuade the Labour Relations Board to allow a group of public service members to break away in defiance of legislation and standard labour relations practice.
Unless Queen Danielle wants to, as Oliver Crowell once did, create a ‘New Model Army’ to enforce the UCP’s will across the land. Of course Cromwell was a true believer, in that he was an obstinate, wildly pious, unrelenting, and destructive period in British history that is the best left forgotten. I mean, the dude was ritually executed after he was given his state funeral — he was dug up, hung, beheaded, and his head, legend says, placed on a spike on the roof of Westminster Hall. (Now there’s the kind of fate that idiot politicians deserve.)
The creation of the ‘Alberta Rangers’ no doubt a nod to the Texas Rangers is comical. For one thing, the original Texas Rangers were founded as a citizen’s investigative division, attached to the State of Texas, and outside political influence. In other words, a state-sanctioned posse comitatus, so don’t mess with them or Texas. I’m thinking this Alberta Rangers will be more like Maurice Duplessis’s QPF, and his personal muscle.
The way I see it, the UCP wants their own provincial police force, because they want complete power and control, and anybody who disagrees with them will be punished. It’s going to be like a police state. To begin with, the UCP wanted the R.C.M.P ditched, only because their (previous) leader was under investigation for his leadership race, and how he got there. A provincial police force will not be cheap either, but the UCP doesn’t care about the costs, and municipalities will be picking up the costs, and their municipal property taxes will climb even more. We have a big mess with the UCP, but many Albertans were too ignorant to see how bad the UCP were from the start.
My German relatives certainly knew how dangerous this was when Hitler did it. Creating a police state controlled by Danielle Smith to be used against anyone who doesn’t agree with her is not what Albertans want. Yet how can you stop these mindless seniors from supporting it? She can do no wrong.
We think that getting rid of the RCMP and eliminating the $171 million Ottawa pays Alberta towards their costs would likely increase property taxes by 15%. What do you think?
Alan K. Spiller: Thanks for sharing your insights. I think you are correct.
There are people who do have an ethnic background that happens to include countries that were dictatorships, or police states. I’m included in that category, as I have grandparents and great grandparents who left such places, because of government oppression, and I am well read on world history.
Where will these R.C.M.P officers go? Mounties exist in my family, and I happen to have a nephew who is in the R.C.M.P. The others have retired. As you know with these phony Conservatives and Reformers, they are all good at destroying jobs.
A group of disgruntled public sector workers seeks to part ways with their union on the premise that they do not feel they are well represented by it … haven’t we heard this before?
https://www.facebook.com/p/LPNs-for-Change-100084158888921/?checkpoint_src=any
It’s strange how many of these shadow groups keep springing up. The Alberta Paramedic Association (APA) is another organization that claims to be the voice of Alberta paramedics. It’s not the union, but it’s given legitimacy by media.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-staffing-paramedics-1.6705045
Although that article does not make it clear, the union representing paramedics is, in reality, the Health Sciences Association of Alberta (HSAA), as we can see here:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-paramedics-union-covid-1.6227647
Dusty Myshrall, the founder and president of the APA, left the organization to run for nomination as the UCP candidate in Lacombe-Ponoka. He lost out to Jennifer “poop cookies” Johnson.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/the-battle-for-the-identity-of-the-ucp-is-being-waged-in-nomination-races-across-alberta-1.6748223
Funny how the political ties to these shadow groups lead back to the UCP.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-paramedics-union-covid-1.6227647
It should be noted that a labour group such as the Alberta Teachers’ Association is not a union.
So why are these sheriffs wanting to form an association, but publicly claiming it a union?
Oh yeah – semantics – Alberta Semantics. df
Mennnis: You can call a union an association or a federation, and even, in the bad old days, a brotherhood. If it bargains collectively and it’s subject to the Labour Relations Code, another piece of legislation, it’s a union. HSAA is a union. AUPE is a union. The ATA is a union. The ATA was, and still is (I think, without checking), both a union and a regulatory college, which in my opinion is an illogical and inappropriate combination. The UCP has changed this, much to the chagrin of the ATA, but I don’t think the change has fully taken effect. Regardless, as far as I can tell, the sheriffs’ association would come under the Society’s Act. it aspires to come under the Labour Code. DJC
You possibly have a point about about the ATA. Working conditions in schools are so intimately tied to student outcomes however that the knot would need to be untied with great diplomacy and expertise. The public teacher registry, which still lists dead teachers like my husband, is not that.
Shane Saskiw is also married to Shannon Stubbs…long time MP for the Federal Conservative Party. The spiderweb has no end.
Playing anagram Scrabble™ with the day’s political headlines keeps the cream from curdling in our morning coffees—at least too quickly.
I sniff, “What’s up with the steady nibbling-away of Alberta public-sector union membership—first nurse practitioners and now this!—sheriffs, for Earp’s sakes!”
“If it has anything to do with the Smith&Parker Gang’s TUBCAP government it’s probably too clever by half,” observes my darling.
Two Downs, down, Three Acrosses to go. “Yes, my dove, but by which half of the UCP? TBA or PC?” I discretely whisk away the small but embarrassing pile of eraser-frass.
“Try Nine Down, second letter an ‘R’,” she suggests distractedly while unencrypting another morning headline. “Smith warns progressives to turn down the kind of rhetoric that just got Donald tRump’s right ear shot off in a failed assassination attempt,” she recites from the glowing quadrangle.
“It was just—but only just just: the man’s the most base demagogue of partisan political violence America has seen since the Civil War. But what’s that got to do with Canadian progressives’ rhetoric?”
“Well, have you seen Danielle Smith in a rush more than ever to volunteer for the tRumpublican side in its pursuit of a “bloodbath” presidential election in November as “retribution” for Joe Biden’s DoJ trying to assassinate tRump for years, now?”
“Would MAGA sooner see tRump in Hell before giving Democrats credit for doing anything right,” I ask in clever rhetorical rejoinder. “Sounds like something you’d read in Reddit…”
“No, dear, it’s right here on the CBC news website,” she says, pinching the top of her right ear.
“Yeah, right!—next thing you’ll be telling me, Smith&Parker are commissioning four giant busts to be carved atop a ridge in Drumheller, Alberta, of Vincent Van Gogh, Donald F tRump, KirkDouglas, and Joni Mitchell in Sherpa toques, each with a large bandage swaddling one of their ears.”
“Don’t be silly, silly: you think Danielle would commission a Mount Gushmore without including herself?”
“Yeah, I can see it all now: Danielle with her Alberta Rangers tin star shining on her Stetson’s grill accepting the nomination as tRump’s running mate, heh, heh,..”
“Now THAT would be Reddit!”
Yes, my sweet, but in this day and age in Alberta’s half of Diagolon, almost anything is possible—at least rhetorically. Hmmm, I smell something rhotic in the State of Alberta…
…T, B, A, U, C, P—uh—T,U,B—eureka!—it’s an ‘R’!
“Sweetheart!—I solved 23 Down!! It’s “TUBCRAP”!!!…”
…but she’s idly rolling the top of her right ear between her thumb and index finger while zooming in on Goggle maps with her free hand.
“When was the last time you visited Drumheller,” she asks, dragging us virtually across the Cordillera and over the high prairie.
“TUBCRAP, TUBCRAP, hmmm…how come it doesn’t fit with Ten Across and Three Down, ‘From Sea to Sea to Sea’?”
Man!—these Cryptic Crosswords of Alberta politics sure are a puzzle—too clever by half!
Wonderful this.
The UCP will not approve the new Union. The UCP are anti-union and they don’t want to spend the money necessary to fairly compensate Police Offices. The RCMP, and Calgary and Edmonton Police make 35-40% than Sheriffs.