CUPE is continuing its fight to keep members’ deferred wages from funding for-profit health care. CUPE Ontario recently joined forces with the three other unions with members in OMERS (the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System) to oppose any pension fund investment in the provincial Tories’ latest P3 scheme, a privatized addiction and mental health facility in Toronto.
While CUPE doesn’t represent any workers at the Toronto site, it is standing squarely beside the workers in the facility, and connecting the P3 cash grab to a bigger privatization plan in the province.
OMERS is planning to invest workers’ money in privatized health care through Borealis Infrastructure Management Inc., which is partly owned by OMERS. Despite ongoing pressure from CUPE and others, OMERS seems determined to push ahead, and has earmarked $100 million as its first ‘investment’ in P3 hospitals.
CUPE Ontario repeated its call for joint trusteeship of OMERS, and urged voters to defeat the Tories and their P3 hospital plans in the upcoming provincial election.
While OMERS has pledged not to fund any privatized infrastructure that would harm services, the fund has already broken its promise by pursuing P3s at the William Osler Health Centre in Brampton, the Royal Ottawa Hospital and the MSA Hospital in Abbotsford, BC. All involve services. Borealis is part of the consortium chosen to own and operate the Brampton hospital.
For a background check on Borealis, and the other corporate players seeking to profit through P3s in health care, read the September 2003 issue of Organize magazine, and visit CUPE’s Hospital Employees’ Union on the web for the full corporate rap sheets at www.heu.org.
