MPI board chair in Arizona amid strike

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This article was published 15/09/2023 (722 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The board chairman of Manitoba Public Insurance is defending his decision to spend two weeks in Arizona as 1,700 striking employees of the Crown corporation remain off the job and on the picket line.

Ward Keith, 60, told the Free Press from Arizona Friday that he was spending the two weeks attending to personal business issues in the U.S. state, but was staying in a vacation home he and his wife own.

“Despite the fact that I have been on this two-week trip to my retirement home in Arizona, I am in regular contact with MPI officials through daily phone calls and virtual meetings, and that is just as would be the case if I were in Winnipeg,” Keith said.

Keith retired from MPI five years ago, last working as the corporation’s vice-president of business development and communications. He returned earlier this year to lead the MPI board after the former chair quit. After taking on the role, which pays him $35,000 a year, he quickly waded into the controversies following the public insurer.

He announced that former president and chief executive officer Eric Herbelin had been fired last spring after an external organizational review of MPI. He also said he had “significant concerns” about MPI’s chief information technology officer, Siddhartha Parti, who had been commuting from his home in Ontario to Winnipeg on the taxpayer’s dime.

Parti resigned from the position in June rather than move to Manitoba.

At the time, Keith was highly critical of Parti’s arrangement with MPI, stating that while the Crown corporation was pursuing a hybrid work model for local employees, none of those workers were in executive positions or officers of the company.

Keith said his Arizona trip was not funded by MPI and was separate from his work as board chair.

As a board member, he does not have permanent office space at MPI but is expected to attend board meetings. Several press releases with updates about the strike on behalf of MPI have been sent out since he arrived in Arizona, with Keith providing quotes from across the border.

“As concerning as this may be for some people, particularly MPI employees on the picket lines, there’s nothing subversive here,” he said. “I am continuing to provide the exact same level of oversight that I did before I came here two weeks ago, and that I will continue to provide next week when I’m back in Winnipeg.”

Striking MPI workers and Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union members are in their third week of strike action.

The union called Keith’s departure concerning.

“It’s not a good look for the government and MPI spokesperson to be lecturing our members about what is fair from his getaway down south,” the union said in an email.

Kelvin Goertzen, the minister responsible for MPI, declined to comment.

Keith said his commitment to MPI’s staff shouldn’t be called into question.

“No one should think that because I’m in my home in Arizona for a pre-planned trip that somehow that should be reflective of the fact that I don’t care about what’s going on within Manitoba, because I absolutely do. I care deeply about the organization and its people,” he said.

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Some MPI employees on the picket lines were not convinced.

“He’s been sending these condescending, divisive messages to us from his vacation home,” said one MPI employee.

Another picketing worker said she was “sad and disappointed” by Keith’s decision.

“We’ve had staff members stung by wasps and be transported via ambulance, we have been rained on, we have had good and bad days. If we are here and present and willing to take this to the next step in negotiations, then where is he? Why is he not present?”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

Every piece of reporting Malak produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.