Union leaders previously banned from Legislative Assembly return as Higgs-era edict lifted

Three union leaders from the Canadian Union of Public Employees who were previously banned from the Legislative Assembly were allowed to return on Tuesday, as MLAs gathered for their first sitting under the government of Premier Susan Holt.

CUPE officials Steve Drost, Sandy Harding and Sharon Teare were banned from the legislature and surrounding area in December 2023 after taking part in a protest a few days earlier in the public gallery.

Drost is the president of CUPE NB, Harding is CUPE’s regional director, and Teare is president of the NB Council of Nursing Home Unions, which is part of CUPE. On Tuesday, they received a notice from Sergeant-at-Arms Gilles Côté stating that their right to access Parliament Square — an area that includes the legislature and adjacent buildings and grounds — had been “reinstated.”

“This email is a formal notification that your rights to visit, participate in or physically attend any part of the Parliament Square, including the Legislative Assembly Building, located between the streets of Queen, King, St. John and Secretary Lane, in the City of Fredericton, in the Province of New Brunswick, has been reinstated effective immediately,” it stated.

The email came at 11:32 a.m., just a few minutes after Liberal MLA Francine Landry was named Speaker of the House, before the throne speech. In a message to the NB Media Co-op, Harding said her understanding was that following the speaker’s appointment, the first order of business was to direct the sergeant-at-arms to lift the ban.

Harding called the development a “really good first step in collaboration with CUPE leaders from this government,” adding that “CUPE members were extremely happy to see this happen and it gives us all hope for the next four years.”

It marks a shift in tone from the dismal relationship between public sector unions and former premier Blaine Higgs, tensions which culminated in a 16-day strike by 22,000 CUPE members in 2021.

The province remained at loggerheads with CUPE as the Higgs government passed a law in December 2023 that forced thousands of public sector workers into shared-risk pensions. Labour leaders called that legislation an attack on free collective bargaining rights, as it quashed defined benefit pension provisions in several negotiated agreements.

At the time, dozens of union members assembled in the public gallery of the Legislative Assembly, where they chanted slogans and heckled government MLAs who voted for the legislation, in defiance of rules against “interruption or disturbance.”

Days later, the three CUPE leaders received notice from the Sergeant-at-Arms saying that they had been banned indefinitely for “disrupting the proceedings of the Legislative Assembly by shouting and chanting,” although the vote had gone ahead.

The leaders of the Liberal Party, Green Party and NDP all pledged to lift the ban ahead of last month’s provincial elections, according to Drost. “All three of them said that that was ridiculous and that they would be reversing that ban,” he said in a recent interview with the NB Media Co-op. “We are cautiously optimistic that we can improve labor relations.”

David Gordon Koch is a journalist with the NB Media Co-op. This reporting has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada, administered by the Canadian Association of Community Television Stations and Users (CACTUS).