On March 25, City Council’s Utility Committee unanimously rejected an attempt to move toward privatizing the multi-unit collections area of Waste Services.
In June of 2021, Utility Committee (under the previous City Council) had directed City Administration to bring back a report looking at what a full privatization of multi-unit collections would look like.
Since the municipal election in October, President Eric Lewis of CUPE Local 30 has been raising this as a concern in his meeting with Councillors, so congratulations to him and the CUPE members who worked to raise awareness about the drawbacks of privatization. Credit also goes to City Administration who did a good job outlining the issues this would create in their report back to Committee (in fact, CECU spoke at Committee on Friday, in support of Administration’s recommendation.)
At that Utility Committee meeting on Friday, it was great to see City Councillors and the Mayor asking the right questions and, by a vote of 7 – 0, approving Mayor Sohi’s motion to move ahead with Citycontrolled collection of multi-unit properties. Thank you to Mayor Sohi and Councillors Cartmell, Paquette, Stevenson, Salvador, Tang and Janz.
Let’s also take a moment to thank CUPE Local 30 and President Lewis for their work in protecting public services!
