tailgunner wrote:Raymond also had the means, ability and forum to enact change as ACPA's MEC chair. It seems that nothing was pushed for, nor changed under his leadership of ACPA. He was also benefiting from having retirements at 60...... Raymond is uniquely qualified to answer why, under his leadership, ACPA never entered into an agreement with AC with regard to retirement age changes. He was driving the ACPA truck.
If you have read my earlier posts, you will recall that it is uncertain at what date age 60 was no longer the “normal age of retirement.” Sometime before 2006, in my view, and sometime after 1990. Remember, the Tribunal in 2007 based it on a statistical count, 50% plus 1. But that calculation or process was never applied to pilots before then. In the 1980’s when Ross Stevenson filed his challenge, virtually 100% of the pilots in the major airlines in Canada were forced to retire at age 60.
So this idea of what is “the normal age” never came up for discussion prior to George Vilven’s complaint, at least not at ACPA, for at least two reasons. Nobody, and I mean
nobody raised the issue. The restriction wasn’t in the collective agreement, it was in the “plan text” of the pension plan. And none of the pilots, save for those on the Pension Committee, ever were provided a copy of the plan text. I know I wasn’t, even as MEC Chair.
The second reason that it never arose before the MEC was that the two years in which I was an elected representative were extremely tense and tumultuous. We were in critical negotiations and we received a 98% Strike Vote with 96% of the members voting. At three different times over the course of the summer of 2000, I had the required 72-hour Notice of Strike to the Minister of Labour sitting in the fax machine, waiting to hit the SEND button. It was that close.
Even after we concluded the collective agreement, Air Canada attempted to contract out a good portion of our flying to SkyService. That led to another two months of extremely tense confrontation, and I mean
extremely tense! There were dozens of other issues before us at the time, especially the merger of Air Canada and
Canadian pilot lists, through arbitration, the
Mitchnick Award, the CIRB decision to overturn that award, and the subsequent final award by a different arbitrator. Conflict, conflict, conflict.
If you get the impression that there was conflict with external factors, let me suggest that the external conflict was nothing compared to the inner conflict evidenced in the division of the 14 MEC members, each with his own vested interest, a couple of whom opposed virtually every action that I took and every statement that I made to the media, even though I received magnificent support from the majority of the membership for my dedication and performance.
So mandatory retirement never came on the radar, period.
One other misconception regarding your post. As I stated earlier, the MEC Chair has ZERO authority to do anything other than call meetings. I believe that that is still the case. Even if I had thought about this issue, then, I had no authority to do anything about it. Period.
So what happened, years after I left the elected office? Well, to start with, one by one every Provincial jurisdiction in Canada repealed their mandatory retirement provisions. There was a monstrous public shift in attitude towards age discrimination in employment.
At the same time, every airline in Canada, save for Air Canada, had removed mandatory retirement restrictions from their pilot agreements. At least from 2002 onward, this meant two things. First, social policy with respect to age discrimination in employment no longer countenanced the practice. Second, the statistical balance that underpinned the formula for the “normal age of retirement” had obviously moved, bringing into question the legal validity of the AC-ACPA provision. That did not really come to the fore until 2005 to 2006, when Vilven’s complaint went to the Tribunal. For the first time since the 1980’s, Air Canada's pilot union was formally presented with this issue, anew.
So you can sit there now, look in hindsight through your periscope of history at one small speck of what was then a non-issue and lash out with all the vigour you want about woulda, coulda, shoulda, disregarding all of the image outside of your narrow historical lens, and impute all sorts of malfeasance. But before you do so, you should at least get some perspective.
Again, if you read my posts above, you will recall that I had nothing to do with the filing of the Vilven complaint (or the Neil Kelly complaint, for that matter). I arrived on the scene after the complaints had spent three years before the CHRC and were actually in litigation before the CHRT.
And, as I pointed out above, those two complaints, in 2005,
formalized the issue of law that is still before the Tribunal and the courts, before I became involved. The legal dispute landscape was defined before I had anything to do with the issue. So my involvement was irrelevant to the description of the present issue. What I did was structure a support system to sustain the David vs. Goliath case on behalf of those who disagreed with their own union's support of the employer's position.
Look at it from this perspective. Both Air Canada and ACPA have spent millions of dollars, and I mean millions of dollars, on legal counsel fees to oppose the interests of these complainants. What single individual could possibly meet that challenge, financially? The union was spending these complainant's union dues to fight their own members' legal interests. That's where I drew the line and became involved, offering my expertise to offset the non-level playing field.
Why did I get involved? First, George Vilven asked me to assist him immediately after ACPA had changed its tune about representing him.
Second, I had spent two years appointed by the Manitoba government to the Manitoba Human Rights Commission in the early 1990’s (the Commission is akin to a “Board of Directors.” We decided which complaints were sent to adjudication). As such, I was intimately familiar with the legislation, with the case law, and with the political implications of the social changes in progress.
I could see that, as I stated above, it was not “if” but “when,” particularly given the wording of the federal legislation, “normal age of retirement for individuals engaged in similar work,” and the case law in other industries that anointed the statistical assessment of the legality of the provision.
I could also see that there was a pot of gold waiting to be claimed. Each senior pilot retired generated at least 10 additional courses, at a cost of at least $40,000 per course, times 60 retirements per year. If only a few delayed their retirement, the foregone expense would have been in the millions of dollars per year. That had to be worth addressing by the union as one option to off-setting any negative impact on career progression, especially given the inevitability of the statutory amendment.
The rest, as they say, is history.
