Posted: Thursday, 8 July 2010

Ken Georgetti, CLC President, responded with a letter to a misleading opinion article carried in 25 Canadian newspapers belonging to the Sun Media chain on July 7. Eric Duhaime, the article’s author began by blaming labour groups for the street protests and police reaction in Toronto during the G20 summit late in June. Duhaime also made a number of other inaccurate claims about unions. Georgetti responded immediately with a letter to each of the 25 newspapers. To date, nine of them have carried Georgetti’s letter. They include: Toronto Sun, Welland Tribune, Winnipeg Sun, St. Catharines Standard, Sarnia Observer, Calgary Sun, Edmonton Sun, Peterborough Examiner, and the Brockville Recorder & Times. Those newspapers obviously believed that Duhaime’s misleading article deserved a rebuttal. What about the other 16 Sun Media newspapers that have not published Georgetti’s letter? 

Letter to the Editor

Your freelance writer, Eric Duhaime hangs his rant against unions on the patently false claim that we were to blame for what happened in the streets of Toronto during the G20 summit. Clearly Duhaime is an armchair critic who wasn’t on the scene. The CLC, together with a number of other groups, organized a peaceful demonstration which attracted up to 30,000 people. We exercised a democratic right to tell G20 leaders that there can be no recovery from the economic crisis unless they place a priority on the creation of good jobs. We cooperated with police in choosing the route for our march and had hundreds of parade marshals to maintain order. Our event was entirely peaceful from start to finish.

Toronto’s police chief said as much at a news conference. Does Duhaime, from his safe distance, know something that Toronto’s police chief does not? Duhaime also makes other fatuous claims in his article – that higher levels of unionization lead to more unemployment and that labour groups are richer than the majority of publicly traded companies. I challenge him to back up either of those assertions. His attack on the women and men of the labour movement is both nasty and ill-informed.

Ken Georgetti,
President, Canadian Labour Congress