Most OPSEU Members Don't Know a Leadership Election Is Happening Right Now — That's Not Their Fault, It's a Leadership Failure
You can check your bank balance at 2 a.m. and compare every phone on the market on your bus ride to work. So why is it so hard to track your own grievance, reach your staff rep, or find out what resources your dues are supposed to give you?
At a recent town hall, we discussed how most OPSEU members across this province don't even know a leadership election is happening right now. They don't know who controls the budget, what decisions are being made, or how to access what they're already paying for.
If a few members couldn't find their way around, you could call that an individual problem. When most of your membership can't, that's an institutional one. That responsibility sits with leadership.
An OPSEU member submits a claim and gets denied over a forgotten parking receipt. A grievance sits for months and nobody calls to say where it is. A staff rep changes assignments and the new one shows up cold — no handover, no context — asking you to start over. A cyber attack hits and 180,000 members aren't told what happened or what to do.
These aren't one-offs. These are patterns. And every single one traces back to systems that were never built to be navigated by the people they're supposed to serve.
Solidarity is the foundation of everything a union does. But we can't build solidarity with members we've made it impossible to reach. And democracy doesn't mean much if the people paying for it can't find the door.
I'm not waiting to be elected to start fixing that. We built a Delegate Toolkit to combat a small piece of this systemic disconnect — plain-language resources that break down how this union works, what this election decides, and how to make an informed choice about who you want representing you. You don't have to vote for me. You don't even have to be from Region 5. This kit is for every member who wants to better understand what is going on in their union.
180,000 members pay into this union. Every single one of them deserves to understand what it does, how it works, and how to use it. That shouldn't be a campaign promise. That should already exist.
This toolkit should have existed long before a campaign had to build it.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
