Ross

Hello Bonjour I'm Kyle Ross, my pronouns are he/him and I would like to acknowledge that I am speaking from treaty 1 territory the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene Peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

 

Je suis bilingue pour ceux qui préfèrent parler en français.

 

This campaign was such an amazing experience, meeting so many activists and discussing their views and my vision for the MGEU has been so rewarding. During these conversations we usually discussed the healthcare losses or the difficulties to get members to attend local meetings. We usually ended up at the same conclusion, the MGEU needs to grow and change to be successful. It feels as if we are stuck in the nineties; but at that time our members were active and ready for that challenge. Currently we are not. 

 

The incumbent will tell you we need to stick with the status quo and that we need to maintain stability. I ask what stability? Didn’t we just lay off a bunch of staff, lose 10,000 members, and been accused of raiding by WANTE (Winnipeg association of Non-Teaching Employees) ? If now is not the time for change then when? We've been under attack by this conservative government for 5 years and we have hardly even put up a response. It's time for all of us to start standing up for each other, we need unity and solidarity now more than ever. Our union has forgotten that it's the locals and their leaders that make us successful and we will get back there.

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We need to talk about member engagement, and I’m not talking about members reaching out to the president. Our current president would have you believe that she is the keeper of all information, if you need info on your bargaining talk to her, workplace issues talk to her, if you have any questions talk to her. When this happens it devalues the hard work of our staff and elected activists. We need members reaching out to their local leaders and staff reps. This is where that information lives and we need to direct the members there first. This will build up trust and open up the lines of communication within the local, this also ensures that the people who are most familiar with the issues are the ones answering the questions.

 

Communication is something that I’ve been talking about for some time now and have had many conversations at the board and with activists about it. The way the MGEU communicates with us is broken. We don't need weekly or monthly updates of what our president did, we need to hear about the leaders in our own local and the things they are doing to improve our working conditions. Our union is way bigger than our president and we need our members to know this. If you go digging into the MGEU website, which I did, you’ll notice that we used to post at the local and component level rather consistently, then around 2016 this just stopped. We need to bring this back; the MGEU sends far too many communications that don’t apply to the reader. I will stop the monthly presidents 5 minute update, from my conversations very few people read it. I will start a new program that has our local leaders send something out to their members that they will actually read and care about because it actually has information that pertains to them. This program will issue each local president a “@mgeu.ca” email address and the message to the membership will come from this account. This will create a new avenue for members to reach out to their elected activists and create new lines of communication.

 

Our union's leadership needs to change the way we lead. Right now, we have 1 leader at MGEU. When I look at our union I see more than 800 leaders. I'm talking about all our elected activists. We need to work harder to get these leaders more involved with the activities of our union. We need them empowered with the tools required to support their members. My goal is to foster an environment where leaders can grow and succeed and push their leaders to be better. As a leader I expect to be held accountable for my actions and decisions. I expect the people around me to let me know when they disagree with me and why. Good leadership fosters these types of environments where people are free to speak their minds. 

 

One last item I think the MGEU should explore is creating an online self directed course for new activists. This will give them the information they need to get off to a good start. We can show them the support they have until they can get into the great courses the MGEU offers. This is especially important when someone is elected mid term.

 

Now I would like to thank my wife for encouraging me to take on the challenge of becoming President of the MGEU. I would also like to thank my children for not yelling and fighting while doing these virtual meetings. Finally, I would like to thank all of you for attending this virtual convention and showing the leadership it takes to make our union great.

 

Thank you for listening, let's make this change together.