Protest at the Ontario Liberal Convention

There is still room available for those wishing to attend the Protest at the Ontario Liberal Convention on Saturday, January 26 at the Allan Gardens in Toronto.  Bus rides are free, but you must register to tvotpd@gmail.com or call 519-641-3936.  Buses Depart from Teachers' Local:  9:30 am sharp (arrive by 9:15 am) 2911 Bateman Trail, London.  The Rally is in Toronto at 1:00 pm.  The time at which the buses will depart from Toronto is yet to be determined. 
This is a wonderful opportunity for you to make a difference and start seeing what you can do for yourselves.  Your Local is trying to do everything it can for you- it's time for you to step up to the plate and Saturday is one way to show your support.

For those of you who do not follow us on TWITTER (and you all should), here is a very good short article from Bud Wildman, former NDP MPP from 1975-1999 in the Riding of Algoma. He is also a former Cabinet Minister:

 

"Would India have achieved independence from British colonial rule when it did; would African-Americans have gained equality before the law and would the Civil Rights Act have been passed in the 1960s; or would the apartheid regime have been defeated and Black majority rule have been achieved in South Africa in the early 1990s, if Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandella and their followers had accepted Warren Kinsella's view, published in the Jan. 14th, 2013, edition of the Sault Star, that "Either you favour the rule of law, or you don't.
Would the institution of slavery in the U.S.A. have been eliminated and the federal union have been preserved if President Lincoln and the Congress had acquiesced to the laws passed by the elected lawmakers of the southern slave states or to the subsequent cessation of the Confederacy?

Would racial discrimination and segregation laws and Jim Crow laws duly passed by lawmakers elected by the voters in the southern states have been repealed if Dr. King and his followers had not been prepared, through non-violent actions, to break those laws in their campaign to gain racial justice?

Surely, when governments pass unjust laws, it is the duty of citizens to oppose those laws and the governments that pass them by peaceful democratic means, if not by extra-parliamentary means, as Mandella and the ANC had to by resorting to armed struggle in South Africa.
Would the labour movement in North America ever have achieved recognition of free collective bargaining and the right to legally withdraw their services if they had not resorted to (at the time) illegal strike actions to pressure employers to accept workers' and union rights and for lawmakers to amend the labour laws?
If labour leaders, democratically elected by their unions' memberships, genuinely believe that the democratically elected Legislature of Ontario has passed an unjust and undemocratic law--Bill 115--then is it not their democratic duty to resist and protest the implementation of that law, even if, according to that same 'unjust' law, their actions might be considered illegal? Surely, they should do all in their power to resist an unjust law."
Bud Wildman
Echo Bay