Union urges voters to make buy local civic election issue

The City of Winnipeg’s largest union is calling on voters to demand local-first practices from candidates running in the civic election in October.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 500 has launched a petition and is running video ads that criticize city contracts recently awarded to U.S.-based companies: garbage collection from GFL Environmental, which moved its home base to Florida this year, and the decision to end its contract with Salisbury House, to provide food at two city-owned golf courses, after 16 years and switch to Aramark.

“These are city services paid for by Winnipeggers, but the money isn’t staying here, it’s not just going to your neighbour’s local business,” Winnipeg resident Ian Bawa says in one video ad posted to YouTube. “The local guarantee asks every municipal candidate to commit — when these contracts renew, bring the work back in house, give it to Manitoba-based companies.”

The petition has garnered more than 4,000 names.

Union president Gord Delbridge said the ad campaign was started owing to growing frustration from the membership who have watched revenue flow out of the province to the United States.

“We want to see more focus on our community, and by doing so, we believe that awarding more jobs locally would be better for the community, for our own economy,” Delbridge said Tuesday.

Mayor Scott Gillingham has repeatedly said that adding a local advantage clause to the city’s contract awarding process would violate trade agreements.

After some debate with city councillors, the mayor raised a motion in May that would request staff study “possible bid criteria that could be used to ensure local companies are given equal and fair opportunity to bid on city contracts.”

Delbridge called the trade agreement argument a “false cop-out” and said the city needs to think creatively when building contracts.

“In these agreements, it says that any (contract) beyond a certain dollar amount has to be considered internationally. Break up the contract and don’t single source it. There’s ways you can do this,” he said. “People do it all the time. It’s been done before here, it can be done going forward.”

While the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce has long called for improvements to government procurement systems in Manitoba, president and CEO Loren Remillard called freezing out non-local companies a “retaliatory game (in which) no one wins.”

“I have some reservations about organized labour once again asking elected officials to intervene and interfere with administrative processes around procurement,” he said. “Have we not learned our lessons from past failures when political officials interfere, even with good intentions?”

However, Remillard said, there are ways to improve the procurement process without violating those agreements, including implementing criteria that don’t directly favour local suppliers but seeks suppliers with knowledge of or connections with the local market, or offering more outreach and response to local bidders on why their bids may not have been successful.

“Explain to (them) the level of benefit back to our community from your bid — that could be tax revenue, it could be jobs created, it could be knowledge transfer,” he said.

Meanwhile, a massive construction contract discussed at Tuesday’s executive policy committee meeting is set to be the first project to incorporate council’s social procurement framework, which seeks to increase city partnerships with Indigenous groups and other marginalized communities.

EPC voted in favour of awarding a $815.48-million contract to Red River Biosolids Partners to build the biosolids facilities at the North End sewage treatment plant. The facilities take sludge from Winnipeg’s three wastewater treatment plants, treat it and convert it to usable biosolids.

Gillingham called the contract, which still requires full council approval, the largest in his memory and possibly the largest contract awarded by the city.

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He said 92 per cent of the people working on the project will be Manitobans.

“That is significant, because this project is not something that will just be over at the end of a construction season this summer,” he said. “This project will go on for years to come, which means work for people for years to come.”

Should council approve the project, the facilities would begin treating biosolids in October 2030.

— With files from Joyanne Pursaga

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.