McGuinty appointed Tory MPP to WSIB to gun for majority
by Julian Ichim – Kitchener, Ontario
While the Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP struggled to distinguish themselves as they battled it out for control of two ridings in Vaughan and Kitchener that were up for grabs with the September 6 by-elections, less is being said of how the Kitchener by-election was triggered to begin with.
On August 22 at Queen St. Commons in downtown Kitchener, Ralph Gerstenberg, a member of Steelworkers Local 1005 and the Ontario Injured Workers Association, spoke about the plight of injured workers. Gerstenberg described how the latest collaboration between the provincial Liberals and Tories (or at least one Tory) that triggered the by-election in Kitchener is about to make the situation of injured workers much worse.
Progressive Conservative MPP Liz Witmer gave up her seat in late April 2012 at Queen’s Park in exchange for the McGuinty government appointing her as the chair of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario (WSIB). This places her in charge of an agency dealing with workplace injuries and compensation pay for injured workers. The plum position in the bureaucracy will pay her nearly $200,000 a year for the job, despite her notorious track record for attacking workers. In exchange, the Liberals now have a chance of returning to their position of majority government.
In her 22-year career as a Progressive Conservative MPP, Witmer served as a senior cabinet minister and Deputy Premier under Mike Harris. As Minister of Labour under Premier Mike Harris, she enacted legislation abolishing the 8-hour work day, attacked unions, slashed basic benefits for workers, and redefined workplace injury to benefit the bosses, all of which hurt workers and their rights and workplace safety.
Participants of the August 22 meeting in Kitchener committed to exposing and opposing the attacks on injured workers moving forward, agreeing to take up door-to-door outreach to explain the need to put the issues of injured workers on the agenda, distributing the newspaper of the Ontario Injured Workers Association, participating in coalition work with other workers, such as the teachers now coming under attack; exposing the blatant opportunism of the political parties; and most importantly, exposing the need for the working class to come up with there own politics and set their own agenda.
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