The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada
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Ontario Regional Council Kingston DND Branch Activity Report

Number of members: 143 Regular 4 Retired 12 Rands

Current Executive Members

Pete Jozsa Branch President
Tom Zaharopoulos Branch Vice President
Keith Daigle Treasurer
Sylvain Boucher Secretary
Dr. Katherine Banko Member at large
Lucien Gilbert Member at large
Felix Akol Member at large
David Hudson Member at large
James Brace Member at large
Aaron Elliott Member at large
Gerry Murphy Member at large

Previous AGM date: April 10, 2018

Next AGM date: April 16, 2019

Branch Executive Meetings

Last Meeting Date: February 14, 2019

Next Meeting Date: March 21, 2019

Number of meetings held since last Regional Council: 4

2018 Activities

Executive Meetings x 4, Lunch and Learn x 1, Public Service Week Participation, Support and Organization of Events surrounding International Women’s Day (IWD), Visibility push, new Branch logo, shirts and water bottles, member out-reach and RAND blitz.

Issues and Concerns

Standardized Job Description roll-out: All CS positions in DND are to be assigned (wherever possible) a Standard Job Description – this may affect some actual Classifications.  We are working with Director of Civilian Classifications (DCCO) directly to try to mitigate issues. This is an exercise being done TB wide, in advance of the CS to IT group name conversion.

Issues and Concerns (cont’d)

Classifications Grievances and the Ombudsman’s office: The DND Ombudsman’s office found that DND is 18x over the limit for dealing with Classification changes and grievances, and issued a scathing report on Oct 31 and attached 13 recommendations. DCCO is adopting these recommendations and intends to have them all implemented by the 1yr date post report.I met with the Ombudsman on March 12th and Glenn Maxwell has met with him previously.We will continue to meet with the Ombudsman while working with DCCO to try and resolve these grievances from any angle possible – we’ve also made direct contact with the 3rd level authority in Labour Relations grievances pertaining to Job Content.

Contracting Out: Kingston continues to be a hot-bed of contracting out of SH and CS jobs. I have met with the Commander of Health Services and voiced concerns – he has indicated that he sees things from our side, but his hands are tied by higher headquarters. We are escalating the situation so that the Deputy Minster is aware. On the CS side, we continue to take a multi-prong approach in line with the language in the latest CA.

Rands: We recently had several new hires in our Branch, they were not given any info on their belonging to a Union – I have hunted down the party responsible and am assured this will not happen again. In the meantime, we have visited them individually or reached out to known co-workers and had them reach out. By the time of the writing of this report, we hope to have gone from 12 RANDS to 0.

Submitted by: Pete Jozsa
Branch President