Over the past couple of weeks, Metro Vancouver Regional District’s unionized outside workers have been slowly escalating job action, pulling workers off various sites from wastewater treatment plants to regional parks.
The Greater Vancouver Regional District Employees’ Union (GVRDEU), which represents workers involved in regional services, like drinking water, wastewater systems, parks, ecological reserves, and housing communities across Metro Vancouver, are demanding stronger health and safety language in the collective agreement, protections against contracting out bargaining-unit work, and measures to improve recruitment and retention.
Today, workers are picketing at Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Park.
“After 17 months without a contract and no talks planned, our members are forced to increase job action targets, and today Queen Elizabeth Park is being picketed as a message to Metro Vancouver,” said GVRDEU President Jesse Medeiros, in a news release.
“We are not stopping the public from entering, but we appreciate it if they can support our members and tell their elected municipal mayors and councillors to resume bargaining without preconditions.”
Queen Elizabeth Park is a Vancouver park, but the GVRDEU members who work at the Little Mountain Pump Station and Reservoir at the entrance of Queen Elizabeth Park are picketing today.
Workers have also withdrawn two other pump stations in Vancouver and in New Westminster.
While Medeiros warned that the union could “be forced to further escalate” job action if Metro Vancouver management returns to negotiations, Metro Vancouver management has repeatedly stated that they are willing to do so.
In a statement that Metro Vancouver published on June 1, they said they are “ready to return to the bargaining table with the support of a mediator as soon as possible, with no preconditions.”
Further, they repeated that sentiment to Daily Hive Urbanized on June 8 when the GVRDEU was picketing at Grouse Mountain, and again on June 9, when Daily Hive interviewed Amanda McCuaig, Metro Vancouver’s director of external relations.
“Although we’ve offered a wage increase of over 10 per cent over the next three years, the bargaining team on the union side still has a very, very long list. And there’s not a lot of room left for us on the employer side. We’ve made a very strong offer … We keep asking to get back to the bargaining table. We’ve asked to use a mediator. This is the choice that the union has made,” she said.
McCuaig said that they’ve already given five dates to the union to return to the bargaining table, and have now given an additional 10 dates for the union to consider.
Bill Tieleman, a spokesperson for the union, told Daily Hive Urbanized that talks broke off at the bargaining table when Metro Vancouver management said, “‘You have to accept these terms and conditions from our last offer, as a precondition to returning to bargaining.'”
When asked why they’ve said no to Metro Vancouver’s offer to return to bargaining with no preconditions, Tieleman said:
“The question is, are they really dropping their preconditions, or are they saying they’re dropping their preconditions? We don’t know yet.”
What does GVRDEU want?
The Metro Vancouver Regional District is composed of three staffing groups: the Teamsters Union represents indoor employees, GVRDEU represents outdoor employees, and then they have exempt staff, which McCuaig said is management and engineers.
The GVRDEU has spoken strongly against some of the operations of Metro Vancouver management. They’ve pointed out the ballooning costs of the North Shore wastewater treatment plant, where costs jumped from $700 million to $3.86 billion.
“It’s incredible incompetence, and that also means that there’s less money for frontline services, for the recruitment, retention, etc., for the health and safety improvements that the workers want,” said Tieleman.
The GVRDEU has also slammed Metro Vancouver for a 69 per cent increase in exempt staffing and benefits between 2019 and 2024.
Tieleman told Daily Hive that this makes the organization “top-heavy,” and indicates that they’re hiring more managers than frontline union workers.
But McCuaig said that Metro Vancouver management has brought on mostly engineers to deliver more and larger projects for the region, with 60 per cent of their exempt staff engineers and 20 per cent management.
“So that we have the resources in-house to make sure that we’ve got that quality of work, that the oversight of public assets, the oversight of consultants, so that the region isn’t being taken advantage of in any way,” she said.
The GVRDEU’s main focus hasn’t been monetary, however. Tieleman said that the union is demanding stronger language regarding health and safety, following two serious workplace incidents that resulted in hefty WorkSafeBC fines.
He said the union wants “much stronger language” around health and safety, saying that workplace safety incidents are “completely avoidable.”
“The union’s concern is clearly the fact that we could have two very similar incidents or accidents that were preventable in a relatively short period of time … you would think after the first one that everything would be done to avoid it happening again, and yet it did.”
But McCuaig said that Metro Vancouver considers “safety [as] non-negotiable” and that “we take every incident incredibly seriously.”
While she said the regional district ranks third among 71 peer organizations for safety, Tieleman said the union found this “astonishing.”
“I mean, really? If that’s the strongest, I wouldn’t want to see the weakest.”
He didn’t share the specific language the union’s looking for in the collective agreement, but he said they want to ensure that workers can enforce safety regulations.
“There has to be language that union members can say, ‘You’re not following the rules, we’re not proceeding here.’ Basically, make sure that health and safety is first and foremost at all times.”
GVRDEU is also flagging that Metro Vancouver has been contracting out work that union workers previously did.
“More and more consultants are being hired, as well as contractors, to do jobs that should be done by union members, and that’s been a big issue for some time,” said Tieleman.
McCuaig’s response to this was that Metro Vancouver has been working on this issue “extensively,” especially over the last year. She said after Metro Vancouver completed their Services and Cost Efficiencies Review in 2025, it committed to looking at consulting positions to see where they could bring them in-house.
Further, Tieleman said that there are union concerns regarding recruitment and retention, which is why they need a competitive salary and benefits. He added that stronger safety regulations would support this.
With files from Kenneth Chan